“Louise! I cannot follow your flawed logic, not to mention your Sin Tax.”
“I know that Sin Tax is very big in Las Vegas,” she answers, exposing her fangs in one of those so-called Cheshire Cat grins that toney Brit cats affect.
“Okay, kiddo,” I say, knowing Louise hungers for acknowledgment as a relative of mine. “Tell me what you have learned on your little foray.”
Does she bend my ear! And whiskers.
I must admit that I am impressed. Wait! I do not have to admit it, and I do not. I just simply let her spill her guts, as girls will, and will figure out later if she is just dreaming or is really on to something.
It turns out the other half of Midnight Inc. Investigations is all hot and bothered by a whole lot of things I thought only I had discovered and was not worried about. Like, as we have discussed, the fact that the Neon Nightmare club is built like a pyramid-shaped hunk of Swiss cheese, with more hidden rooms and shafts than a pharaoh’s funeral home in the Egyptian desert.
It makes sense. Las Vegas sits in the middle of the Mojave Desert. A lot of folks died here during the mob wars long ago. Bodies and treasure are buried in these forgotten sands of time.
And . . . those secret areas were not just so the Phantom Mage could rappel down on bungee cords nightly. There are rooms occupied by a hidden coven of magicians with ambitions.
Maybe the kit is right. Maybe Midnight Louie had better take a break from murder one at the Red Hat Sisterhood convention and ankle on over to the Neon Nightmare tonight to see what Mr. Max’s former confreres are up to now that the Phantom Mage is MIA too.
Chapter 19
Ding-Dong Daddy
Temple had convinced herself that letting Electra return to the literal scene of the crime was a good idea. An innocent woman would hold her head and hat up, and carry on.
And Detective Alch was okay with it. Simply finding a body was not a crime.
Of course all traces of the late Oleta Lark were gone, conveyed to the Las Vegas coroner. Still, Temple could tell from the subdued note of the lobby chatter that the news of her death was getting around, and hung like a purple-haze pall over the pre-opening activities.
It was most evident in the sidelong glances Electra attracted, even when surrounded by her welcoming Red-Hatted League chapter members. Noticing Detective Su cruising nearby, it occurred to Temple that the police had okayed Electra’s return because they wanted to watch her, and the reaction of everyone else to her. If so, she was letting Electra play right into their hands. Great! Temple believed in supporting her local police, but not in railroading her landlady for murder!
“Electra! You look great,” Alice squealed, the first to spot their missing member. “We are on the trail around here like bloodhounds.” Alice brushed back the bill of her purple-and-red-checked deerstalker.
That assertion made Electra blink.
“Well,” Phyll added, “blood hounds are officially red, aren’t they?”
Temple was glad to leave Electra in the friendly custody of her gal pals and be about her PR person’s business, which was to clear the Crystal Phoenix of any taint, as well as firmly affix the murder rap on anyone other than Electra.
She still had to wear the cursed Pink Albatross (its brim span must have been as wide as that doom-bearing seabird’s wingspan) to pass unchallenged in these main hotel areas now declared the Queendom of Hattitude.
As an unofficial “squirt,” Temple felt like a tugboat cruising among a port thronged with ships of the line. Most of the women were taller and broader than she, so Temple sometimes felt like a child lost at a fairgrounds.
The fact that so many women of a certain age had attained a certain comfortable and even powerful size made Temple realize how easy it would be for one to commit a tidy job of strangulation.
Once the victim’s throat was encompassed, it would surely only be a matter of ruthless compression, of indifference on a murderous scale.
People often threatened to “wring” someone’s neck, but how many could follow through on such a vow for the two minutes or so that it took for the action to complete the impulse?
Not her!
She heard a distant mutter like the cooing of pigeons. Standing on tippy toes on her vintage Beverly Feldman spikes, Temple spotted a male presence cleaving the crowd of red and purple furbelows.
So far only Aldo Fontana had managed that honor. This guy was as tall, but that was because he wore a hat in the sea of hats.
A fawn-colored ten-gallon cowboy hat.
When Temple was able to glimpse the whole man, she saw he was tall but lean in that ready-to-blow-away mode of old cowboys.
His sun-leathered face was cadaverous, with a long, prominent jaw. His jeans were so weather-washed they looked designer-fashionable and his belt buckle was almost as big as his hat.
Of course, Temple was not the only one to have spotted this out-of-place person.
An agitation of red hats surrounded this iconic Western figure.
Then came a shriek.
Weathered Cowboy Guy turned in that direction, then shouted out, “Puddin’ Puss! Is that you?”
Another shriek.
Temple clawed her way through the crowds to the scene of unseemly behavior.
The Red-Hatted League was at the center of it, forming an honor guard around Electra, who had plucked a four-inch-long hat pin out of her double-wide red chapeau and was aiming it at the Stranger in Town.
“Elmore Lark,” she said, “you stay away from me.”
Temple jerked her head back to the guy. This was Electra’s third husband, the bigamist? Well, he was big. Tall, anyway.
“Now, Puddin’ Puss, calm down. I’m jest here to hear what happened to my Pearly Poochie.”
Temple was starting to think Elmore Lark would shortly be found strangled by a pet leash.
“Cain’t we jest talk?” he asked.
“If we had ‘jest talked,’ Elmore Lark,” Electra retorted, sheathing her hat pin in red felt with the panache of a Musketeer, “I would have had a lot happier life.”
“But no darlin’ baby boy Curtiss,” he said with a grin.
Electra grimaced. “And when did you last have contact with your son?”
Elmore shrugged. “A while. Boy needs his mother. A daddy’s jest a ding-dong bother.”
“Well, you were,” Electra said. “You really think I’m gonna sit down meekly and talk to you after all you did, and didn’t do, years ago?”
“Waal, no, Puddin’ Puss. Except I may be the only man in the state of Nevada who jest knows you didn’t do in Miss Pearly Poochie.”
He raised bushy gray eyebrows. “Whatayah say? I came down here to give you an alibi.”
This Temple had to hear. She elbowed her way through a cotton-knit cloud of purple tops to take Electra’s elbow and turn to Elmore Lark.
“The hotel has made an interview room available. Let’s go there. Follow me.”
“Now who are you, Little Lady?” Elmore asked.
“Your worst nightmare or your best chance. Follow me.”
“Yessum. I’d follow your behind anytime anywhere, Little Doggie.”
Electra managed to elbow him, hard, in the bony ribs, while she scampered ahead to catch up with Temple.
“You really want to talk to this scum, Temple dear?” she whispered.
“I’ll talk to anyone who knew the dead woman and might have had a motive to get her that way. He’s the man in the middle, Electra, and they make good witnesses, or suspects. Can you can the vitriol, however deserved, for a while?”
“For you, sure. Besides, I want to watch this worm squirm.”
Hotel conference rooms are depressingly similar: large central wood-grain table surrounded by huge, heavy, impossible-to-move leather chairs. A table along one wall usually holds coffee and hot water urns, foam cups, plastic stirring straws, fake sugar, and fake creamer.
This was the Crystal Phoenix, though, Las Vegas’s classiest hotel long before the Bellagio
, Paris, Venetian, and Wynn went arty and upscale.
The central table was a slab of granite topped with inch-thick glass. The sleek Herman Miller office chairs didn’t take a World Wrestling Federation champion to move them.
The thick-piled carpet boasted a Chihuly-like design that would both wear well and perk up spirits.
And the coffee and tea services were sterling silver. The sugar bowls held sugar. An exotic wood box hid packets of exotic teas and Temple’s favorite sugar substitute, Splenda. The matching creamers held—heavens!—real cream and skim milk, the best of both worlds.
That fact may have been why not one, but two black cats had preceded them to the conference room. That Louie! He respected no boundaries, human or feline! She had to wonder if he was after more than filched cream. Everything he did was reasonably catlike, but it often seemed to have a second purpose. He had a definite penchant for death scenes, always someone’s unlucky black cat. Hmm, Midnight Louie as furry albatross . . .
Seeing the two cats together, Temple could tell that Louise’s furrier frame was much smaller and her tail hair was much fatter than Louie’s muscular buzz cut.
She also had old-gold eyes rather than green ones.
Despite the differences, Temple still wasn’t sure which cat had mixed it up with Savannah Ashleigh’s entourage. She had at first assumed it had been Louie, because he had no liking for the Ashleigh woman. But the Crystal Phoenix was Midnight Louise’s territory now.
“Waal, Puddin’ Puss,” Elmore boomed out. “I see the cats still come to you like rats to cheese.”
The cats eyed him with the same dubious gaze Electra gave him.
“Don’t keep calling me that, Elmore Lark, or I will commit murder.”
“See why I came down, PP? I knew you’d lose your cool. Even if you did knock off Oleta, you’ll need a character witness.”
“You’re only a witness to my bad judgment decades ago.”
“Sit down,” Temple suggested. Ordered. “If you two keep sparring in public it won’t do either one of you any good.”
“That what you brought us in here to say, Little Lady?”
“And you can drop that nickname too. As long as you’re here you can tell me why you didn’t kill Oleta.”
He laughed long and loud about that, then filled up a coffee cup with six teaspoons of sugar before coming to sit at the conference table across from Temple and Electra.
“I’da stood out a little in this Little Red Hen party, don’tcha think? Besides, me and Oleta’s been quit for, oh, three, four years now.”
“Were you officially divorced?”
“As much as God and Reno can make it so.”
“Then why did she describe you as a ‘bigamist’?”
“Haven’t any idea.” He spread his hands wide, his scrawny chest swathed in an innocent checked cowboy shirt with plastic pearl snaps down the front. A plastic cowboy.
Temple turned to Electra. “How did you know for sure you were divorced?”
“I filed the papers before I left. And a couple weeks later I got them, all stamped and signed.”
“By the county, or by Elmore Lark?”
“They looked official, and I was so glad to be quit of him.”
Elmore Lark was tapping his ten-gallon hat on his angular, bejeaned knee. When the women looked at him, he looked away. And whistled.
The sound brought the two black cats lofting onto the tabletop, sighting on him like a pair of hounds from hell, eyes narrowed, hair raised, and hissing.
Temple shook her head. “The divorce never went through. He sent you forged papers.”
Electra was stunned to learn she was still a married woman, and a bigamist herself on top of it.
“Why? Why on earth? He already had hot young Oleta waiting in the other stall?”
Temple narrowed her eyes at the utterly selfish old man. What had he gained by tricking Electra, and Oleta?
“You bore his son.”
“And Curtiss turned out fine,” Electra said, “because he was with me only from the age of six on.”
“You weren’t likely to come back.”
“That’s for sure.”
Temple gave her take on the situation. “Elmore wanted Oleta, but not her greedy claws in him. She was entitled to nothing if it came out the marriage was bogus, and it would if he wanted it to. If something happened to him, when the courts asked for documentation, his worldly goods would have still gone to you and Curtiss.”
Elmore had stopped his irritating whistling and hat-tapping. He looked sheepish.
Electra looked like a little purple teapot with a red cover who was about to blow its top.
“Elmore Lark! Why? Do you realize that I’d remarried since then?”
“Several times,” Temple put in with a “so there” emphasis.
Electra didn’t even hear that. “Is she right? We’re still . . . married?”
“That little filly Oleta. She wanted the whole deal. I don’t trust women like that. I trust women like you.”
“Stupid?”
“Trustin’, Puddin’ Puss. That little girl sorta ran me over. I wasn’t thinking, but I knew enough to make it so she couldn’t get ahold of my horse ranch.” He turned the hat in his bony hands. “Curtiss is my only son.”
“For all you’ve ever seen of him.”
“I’m not the raisin’ father type, but I am the leavin’ father type.”
“That’s for sure,” Electra said, standing up. “I could kill you for what you’ve done to me, and especially to Curtiss.”
Some people found women in purple outfits with red hats amusing and a little silly. Electra’s fervent tone would have convinced them otherwise.
Certainly it convinced the people just entering the conference room.
Temple cringed inside as she noticed and identified them:
Detectives Su and Alch.
Chapter 20
Truth Has Consequences
Detective Su’s first name was “Merry,” which Temple had always found incongruous: Merry Su, a homophone for Mary Sue.
She understood that second- and third-generation Asian Americans often bore delightfully trendy American first names nowadays. It was a mark of assimilation, while maintaining pride in the family name of origin.
And Detective Su was another petite woman in a man’s world, even more petite than Temple’s five-foot-zero, size three and five in clothing and footwear. Su probably wore OO and size four shoes.
So Temple totally sympathized with such a small woman making it in such a man’s world as law enforcement.
But . . .
Sometimes . . .
Sometimes Temple thought Su was a mini-Molina, a female bully who liked to throw her badge and her figurative weight around. In C. R. Molina’s case, Temple was talking about an almost-six-foot-tall woman homicide lieutenant with the cojones of a pit bull and the open mind of a shut-tight miniblind.
This was one of those Su-Molina times.
“We don’t often walk in on a confession of murder,” Su said, folding her arms. She wore a black pantsuit over a white shirt. Her expression and mind seemed to be in an equally black and white mode.
Detective Morrie Alch loomed behind her, a symphony in gray, especially his hair and mustache. From him came a vibe of mature sympathy for all involved.
Not from Detective Su.
“What’s this?” she demanded. “An alternative on-site interrogation room? The hotel has asked us to be discreet. It didn’t require that we be co-opted by an amateur detective with two alley cats for backup.”
“Backup” was the word. Louie and acquaintance obliged by humping their spines like Halloween cats at Su’s approach.
Never duel a cat for attitude, Temple thought, watching Detective Su observe the animals’ fierce united feline front and wisely swagger around them to confront Temple.
“You are not Las Vegas’s answer to Veronica Mars,” she told Temple. “You had no business diverting this man, wh
om I take to be Elmore Lark, from the long arm of the law.”
“Oh, ma’am,” the man in question couldn’t keep from intervening. “She hasn’t been diverting at all. In fact, I am delighted to be released from the presence of my, er, ex-wife and associates, into the custody of such a fine member of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.”
“Shut up,” Su said. “And sit down, hands on the table. Away from the hat.”
Elmore shrugged at Temple and Electra, and the cats, and did as ordered.
Alch came up behind Su on little cat feet. “Let’s take him upstairs for questioning,” he suggested.
“I suppose you think this is funny,” Su said, her dark eyes fixed on Temple.
“No,” Alch said, intervening. “I think you’re right. This is police business. We’re the police and we’ve got the right to question Mr. Lark. Let’s do it someplace private, is all I’m saying.”
“Yeah.” Su turned away from the table. “Do you want to tell the old broad not to leave town, or should I?”
Alch’s eyes shut for an instant. They opened to regard Electra. “Miss Lark, we’d advise you to stay in town, in case we want to talk to you again. It would be even better if you didn’t abuse your permission to be at the convention by getting into arguments with the victim’s ex-husband. It could look suspicious.”
Electra had really appreciated that “Miss.” Especially now. She began beaming at the start of Alch’s speech but gradually lost her glow and was fervently glum by the ending word “suspicious.”
“Thank you, Detective. You can count on me concentrating on Red Hat Sisterhood activities that are completely amusing and innocent.”
Su snorted like a horse. Or a Shetland pony, in her instance. Luckily, she didn’t stamp a petulant hoof.
From the rubber-soled clunky Mary Janes she wore, Temple thought the petite thump she could produce would lack a certain heavy-metal pizzazz that horseshoes and tap shoes share.
“Lightweight,” Temple muttered under her breath as Elmore Lark left the room under the oddball escort of Alch and Su.
Beside her, Electra let out a deep breath and let her head droop to the tabletop. “Holy hypocrite! That bastard lied. About everything. I’m amazed he isn’t the dead body in the morgue.”
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