I had to explain all that to them after I’d clawed them free of tangled 400-count sheets reeking with human foot odors and worse.
But you cannot keep prima donna Persians down. They were happy to heckle me unmercifully all the way down in the empty elevator I snagged for them, playing hide-and-seek through the hotel’s service regions to the back ballroom doors my Miss Temple has so conveniently left ajar. The door is open just enough for her slender self and some super fluffy felines to slip through.
I, naturally, had seen her preparing her rather amateurish little trap at our home base. She sacrificed a half ream of printer paper to create the proper mound on the hatbox cover. I immediately saw through her ruse, but was mystified as to how I could do my duty and provide her effective backup.
Not that I alone am not sufficient for the task, but extra sets of shivs are always welcome when dealing with a rogue human of unknown origin. Miss Midnight Louise, of course, has been stubbornly pursuing the Missing Max case. (If you ask me, she is way too interested in the comings and goings of dudes of another species.)
So it is just me and the Ashleigh girls, who are now plenty riled from their dive and digging out, just as I needed them to be. I realize that I have led them into what would be the equivalent of an opium den to my forebear shamus, Sherlock Holmes. And I have then expected them to contain themselves until the exact right moment.
Even my PI-hardened senses have been twitching at the air of universal prey wafting around this huge, darkened, empty ballroom. Everything our night-piercing eyes view through the crack in the door trembles temptingly with tension.
The air-conditioning wafts the scent of all the things that trigger our predatory instincts. Feathers. Feathers small and coarse, as from turkeys and chickens. Feathers airy and long, as from ostriches and emus. Feathers soft and frilly, as from the elusive marabou, perhaps a relative of the elusive caribou, who knows? Feathers fan-long and colored like deadly poisons, from the stately peacock.
We also scent fake fur. Umm. Soft and plush and so clawable. Microfiber! Double-knit! Spandex! Fabrics, not feathers, but also divinely designed by the great Bast for joyful stalking and rending and reducing to tatters.
I am reminded of the stalker whom Midnight Louise said had shredded Mr. Max’s wardrobe. A very sick individual, as humans go, but there was something of the jungle cat in that primitive action. I too lust after the soft dangling attractions inside human closets. Of course we domesticated cats have learned, mostly, to control these primitive destructive urges. However, we never avoid a legitimate reason to unleash them.
Taking down a murderer will do nicely.
My shivs are slipping in and out of their sheathes, eager to impress themselves on human skin and all the intervening surfaces. I can hear the rip and roar now.
But my doughty roommate’s scream is our version of the late, lamented blue-light special at Kmart stores. The Ashleigh girls, released from pampered civility by a nod of my sagacious head, surge past me, rapacious streaks of riffling fur.
“Not the one who bears my scent,” I remind them with a final snarl, and gallop forward myself, heading for the elevated area where I had earlier spied the tiny light winking as bright as a Birman’s eye.
My well-prepared missiles have hit their shambling target on the ballroom floor by the time I leap up onto the stage.
I hear the mingled screeches and screams of two species, the sublime sound of shivs skiing down several feet of snagged fabric, above and below the belt line. In my observation, there is nothing like the dainty and fluffy Persian for ripping the heck out of anything.
By now the arias of feline fury and human pain have summoned reinforcements. Security people thunder through the front double doors. Some thoughtful person has found the lights and put them all on full power.
Human eyes blink in the glaring light, but my pupils shrink to slits as I focus on my Miss Temple, clearly visible on the Glamour-Glo PhotoLaser stage not twelve feet away. Her low-shod, high-hatted red ensemble is enough to put my fangs on edge, but no one else present is rocked by her shocking and unusual lack of taste.
She is conferring with Fontana brothers three who have materialized with the lights, over the pale-painted mannequin in the hot seat.
Meanwhile, I turn to regard the ballroom floor, where the Ashleigh girls have the target down and are voraciously pummeling a pile of red-and-purple rags that appears to be still moving. And moaning.
Since my Miss Temple is surrounded by sufficient human muscle, I hurtle after my accomplices. Much as I would enjoy joining in on the fun, my position in the community as an upholder of law and order forces me to put a damper on the Ashleigh girls’ exuberant killer instincts.
“Sit and pummel,” I order, moving around to examine our catch.
Whoever described the human female as “a rag, a bone, and a hunk of hair” must have come upon one after a full frontal, two-pronged, thirty-two-nailed feline epidermis workout.
Even I am impressed. I cannot wait to hear what Miss Midnight Louise thinks about the very recent exploits of Louie’s Angels.
Chapter 57
The Naked Truth
“Nasty,” Julio said, gazing with his brothers and Temple at the seated corpse of Natalie Newman.
Temple was still shuddering, which encouraged Ernesto to put a bracing arm around her shoulders.
If Oleta Lark’s corpse had looked unnervingly alive, Natalie was definitely dead according to the TV crime scene stereotype. Her exposed flesh was bluish gray. Blotches of pooled blood streaked her narrow legs like horrible varicose veins.
Even worse, what held her upright was the scarf that had throttled her. Its ends were wrapped around the upright of the wooden chair she sat in. The scarf was purple with a flock of flying red birds. It was not the lethal Oleta Lark scarf design, at least.
“She must have been killed hours and hours ago,” Temple suggested.
Ernesto nodded, pointing to the black-surfaced floor of the portable stage.
“Drag marks,” he said. “She was killed much earlier and hidden behind this curtain background.”
“No one working the photo presentation must have gone back here,” Temple said. “Not until I ducked behind the curtain to hide. Darn! With her death, there goes my main suspect.”
“For the Oleta Lark murder?” Julio asked.
Temple nodded unhappily.
“Then,” demanded Ernesto, “who’s that facedown on the ballroom carpeting under the killer cats?”
“I have no idea. Whoever it is was determined to lay hands on the manuscript of Oleta Lark’s autobiography. I salted the dead woman’s booth with a fake version. I figured that would draw the murderer, but I figured the murderer was Natalie Newman.”
Julio eyed Ernesto and Emilio. “We’d better rescue the unknown lady from the feral felines and turn her over to the police for questioning.”
“Hey, that’s Louie,” Temple said as they got closer. “And the frantic felines who shredded everything in sight are Savannah Ashleigh’s pampered Persians.”
They all paused to study another body, this one definitely alive, but prone and moaning faintly.
Temple took in the purple fishnet stockings and wedgie shoes, red-satin elbow gloves, purple wig, crushed red hat . . . the microfiber muumuu snagged over every visible fold by the Persian girls’ fancy footwork.
“Candy Crenshaw,” she breathed, “the convention’s singing clown princess. I haven’t even dug up a decent motive for her yet.”
“Good,” said a gruff voice behind her. “You’ll leave something for the local police to do.”
She and the Fontana trio turned as one.
Detective Alch stood there, looking officially severe.
“You four get out of here. You’re contaminating the crime scene, whatever it is.”
“Scenes,” Temple said, pointing out the lethal vignette onstage a hundred feet away.
It took Alch a few seconds to realize he was gazing on a
model corpse.
“Su,” he called, “secure the stage and the body.”
Temple saw the other detective leaping up on the stage, sans stairs, to do just that. Louie distracted her from that sad scene by swaggering over to massage Temple’s calves with his sides.
“The cats stay,” Alch ordered. “Our crime techs will need to get their, um, claw prints. So, who do we have here?”
“Candy Crenshaw, a member who heads a girl group of singers here at the Red Hat Sisterhood convention,” Temple said.
“Did she kill the woman up there?”
“That’s Natalie Newman, aka Markowitz. I suspect so. Somebody did,” she answered.
“And why do you suspect so?”
“Well, Natalie’s real last name was Markowitz.”
“A name like Markowitz or Alch, say, is alone cause for suspicion?” Morrie was sounding nettled.
“Oh, no. But I found out that her mother was a Red Hat Sisterhood member in a New Jersey chapter.”
“There are laws against that?” he asked.
“Maybe against New Jersey,” Temple said, grinning, “but not against being in a Red Hat Sisterhood chapter. The suspicious thing is that Natalie changed her name just three years ago.”
“No laws against that.”
“That’s also when her mother left the New Jersey Red Hat Sisterhood chapter,” she pointed out.
“And you know this how?”
“From her sister chapter members, of course. They’re all here. You can confirm everything I say with them.”
“I’ll have Su do it. She’s so good with glitzy ladies like you and Miss Lark.”
A Fontana brother snickered. Alch nailed him with a glance.
“I hope nobody here is illegally carrying, because I have plenty of uniforms arriving to handle even minor infractions of the law.”
Temple sensed a wall of absolutely still and law-abiding Fontana brothers behind her.
“I’m not,” she said virtuously, “and I can’t leave until Louie is released. He’s my . . . roomie.”
Louie stretched up her side to lick her hand. Right on the engagement ring finger. Cats were so territorial.
“Okay, boys,” Alch told the Fontanas. “I won’t look too hard at any bumps in your tailoring if you don’t remain in view for more than twenty seconds. I’ll take care of Miss Barr and her cat. Cats.”
Temple felt the faint aromatic stir of Brut cologne as they faded away like old mob soldiers.
Alch didn’t leave her long to regret their absence. “Why’d you suspect the convention camera woman?”
“She was an outsider, but she obviously had issues with the Red Hat Sisterhood, and despised them. She was filming a deliberately unflattering view of the women at the same time as she did the standard version. I found out her real last name was Markowitz. It’s not unusual for a media personality to take a less ethnic name, but not in reporting. You build a reputation under a byline; you want to keep it. Even if you marry. But Natalie didn’t. Newman. She was a ‘new man’ avenging her father. She also didn’t want any members recognizing her last name and remembering the scandal. With e-mail, it was all over the Web. Tracking some Red Hat Sisterhood chapter gossip, I found out a certain Mollie Markowitz was a ‘scandalous’ Red Hat Sisterhood member in New Jersey. Then it was a question of: if Natalie secretly despised Red Hat Sisters, and her unflattering hidden recordings sure made it look like she did, did Natalie despise her mother too? And if so, why? All I had to do was use the network here to find out more.”
“And you found?”
“Mollie Markowitz resigned the Red Hat Sisterhood because of a red hot scandal. She found so much post-menopausal zest after she joined that she also found a new, younger man and left her husband for him. It was during an outing to a male strip club she’d arranged.”
“A new, younger male stripper?” Alch’s eyebrows rose at this significant piece of news.
“Forty.” Temple lowered her voice. “But I’m told that’s ‘boy toy’ age for certain women.”
Alch groaned. “Any age is ‘boy toy’ age for the benighted male of the species. You girls wrap us around your ring fingers. Don’t deny it! You yourself have two in thrall. And maybe three,” he added, looking down at Midnight Louie.
Unwittingly, Alch had touched on a sore point with Temple. Missing Max. As in Max was missing, not as in she was missing Max, because, of course, she had moved on, and Matt was Divine.
Thinking of Divine, what were Savannah Ashleigh’s cats doing here, except having an unlawful rendezvous with Midnight Louie? There’d be hell to pay with Savannah Ashleigh too. It wasn’t either her or Midnight Louie’s night.
She asked Alch, “Are you serious about the cats being, ah, claw-printed?”
“Yup. They scratched that poor creature on the floor semicomatose. They could be rabid. Could be a lawsuit in it.”
“Even if that woman’s a murderer?”
“Civil law is not criminal law.”
O Savannah! Temple thought. Her pampered Persians in quarantine would not be the cat’s meow.
Alch reacted to squeaking leather and jingling metal over his shoulder as two uniformed officers approached.
“Help the lady up,” he ordered. “Let’s see what the cats dragged down.”
The spindly hose-covered legs wobbled as the cops lifted her in one sustained swoop. Wig and hat fell over her eyes. Feathers from the savaged boa sprinkled down like gaudy ticker tape to the carpet at their feet.
She lifted a red satin-covered forearm to her eyes against the glare of fully illuminated ceiling lights.
“How badly have these cats clawed you, ma’am?” Alch asked, always the gentleman.
At this point, Temple was only a luckless bystander. The hatbox sat untouched three feet away. Temple had no proof that it had lured the woman here.
“Ma’am?” one of the young cops asked, sounding worried.
Something was wrong with the woman, beyond cat scratches. Her head hung like sunflower on a gossamer stem. Her ankles kept turning out so her feet slipped off the wedgie shoes to the floor, twisting the ankle straps.
It was like trying to keep the Strawman from The Wizard of Oz in upright custody. Impossible.
Liquor? Temple wondered. Drugs?
“We need to have this lady walk the line,” one of the uniform cops suggested.
Alch regarded the three cats still milling around her bony ankles and tattered fishnet hose like they thought real fish might be in there somewhere.
“Off with her hat,” he said.
After a tiny pause, one of the cops obliged. The purple wig came with it, to reveal a bald head.
Temple gasped. The poor woman had alopecia or cancer!
She felt terrible that her cat’s purebred posse had attacked her. Maybe the poor thing “shopped” the convention store alone at night to select what she needed, not wanting to face exposure by daylight. Maybe she didn’t want Oleta’s hatbox at all! Maybe it was all a terrible mistake. Hers.
Alch pulled away the boa to reveal bony shoulders and no breasts.
Cancer, surely! This public undressing was cruel!
Why were the uniformed cops chuckling?
“Say, Detective. Guess we have a shemale here. Must be from one of the shows down the Strip.”
Okay. Temple turned her expectations 180 degrees around.
Tall. Boney. Ankles like silly putty on the high wedge heels. No hair on head. No boobs on torso. This was not Candy Crenshaw, however thin. This was not a transsexual in transition. This was a regular guy! In disguise.
Temple watched the red-gloved hand pulled down to reveal badly made-up lips and eyes. Almost clownish. No wonder Temple had assumed the person was Candy Crenshaw. . . .
“Elmore Lark?” Temple couldn’t have sounded more astounded if she had tried.
Good thing that Molina wasn’t here to hear that amazed squawk. And why wasn’t Molina here? She’d have to ask Alch before they all scattered fo
r the night.
Louie, meanwhile, was strutting and hissing as if he’d always known the identity of the attackee. Louie was even better than Temple at putting on a show of omniscience.
“You were trying to steal Oleta’s hatbox,” Temple accused.
“It was my life too,” Elmore said. It sounded suspiciously like a whine. “I just wanted to make sure she hadn’t said any darn damning things about me. Women are so vindictive.”
“Some men are so worthy of it,” Temple answered.
“I’ll conduct this interrogation,” Alch said. “First, Mr. Lark. Do you need medical attention?”
“Sure. Those cats’ claws are like an arpeggio of needles. Mainly, I hit my head going down after they ambushed me. So I got nothing to say until I reach my lawyer in Reno.”
Temple watched the two officers escort their broken-down Red Hat lady out of the ballroom.
Alch was shaking his head.
“Here we have Keystone Kops and on the stage we have a Wax Museum of Horror. We can hold this goofball for unlawful entry and false impersonation, I guess. I want custody of that hatbox, but not the cats. The department can only handle so many silly elements at once. I think we can sort all this out unaided. You and the Pussycat Patrol are outta here.”
Temple didn’t object as another officer took her arm and escorted her to the now-gaping double doors to the ballroom. The Ashleigh girls, herded by Louie, wafted alongside her ankles like overgrown marabou bedroom slippers.
High-intensity lights and crime scene investigators were flooding the lobby outside.
Temple hadn’t even had a chance to fully explain Natalie Newman’s motives, which now that she had been murdered, were moot. She certainly hadn’t had a chance to read every page of Oleta Lark’s book manuscript, but she would now, in what was left of tonight, before Alch discovered the dummy book in the hatbox lid.
Hat. Lid. Box. Dummy.
Temple’s mind was in freefall as she passed a shrieking Savannah Ashleigh at the doors.
Cat in a Red Hot Rage Page 29
