“Ah, real smart, Elmore.”
“Right. I knew right away that would be where she’d hide her tell-all manuscript. It would be with her even when she was outta town, see? By then I was a suspect character, so I figured that if I looked like all those dressed up dolls, no one would spot me.”
“It worked.”
“Except for that miserable little Pink Hat brat. She’s the one who put the hatbox up for bidding, and I bet she found the manuscript before she did it. She deserved a nice little throttle, but—”
“But—?” Starla’s voice was tight with hope and tension.
Elmore stayed silent as the women in the van held their breaths and waited for a damning confession.
“But,” he finally said after an audible bolt of scotch, “someone else beat me to it. These hands ain’t made for strangling. They’re made for—”
“Stop that!” The sound of a slap. “Those hands aren’t touching anything on me until I know you didn’t kill those women.”
“I didn’t, I tell you.”
“That’s not good enough. I need evidence. I need to know who did.”
“Now, sweet potato, why would I know that?” he wheedled. “You wouldn’t starve a man because of what he didn’t know.”
“He’s lying,” Electra said.
“Yes, but what about?” Temple said, frowning.
“Come on, girl, you don’t want to hold out on your future sugar daddy.”
“All the sugar you’ve got’s in your lying words.”
“No. Swear to God. I’m gonna have a pile as high as the Luxor. I’ve got me ranch land up in Reno. Dirt-poor, but it’s like you, sweet potato. It’s what’s under the surface—”
A scuffle was heard. Starla giggled and pretended to pretend to resist, that much was clear.
“We might have to rescue her,” Judy said. “I don’t know how much pawing a Red Hat woman should have to put up with.”
Temple hesitated. This scheme had been a bust, except for the store that had sold them the bottle of Johnnie Walker.
“Wow!” Phyll whispered from the front of the van, peering between the seats through the tinted windshield. “Who’s that heading for Elmore Lark territory?”
They all crowded to hunch behind her while the receiver broadcast sounds of heavy breathing and slap and tickle as Starla tried to fend off Elmore without turning off his expansive tipsy monologue.
A tall, thin woman in blue jeans and boots and a plaid blouse was striding toward Elmore’s door. She never hesitated to knock, but jerked it open.
Starla screamed on the receiver. A thump sounded as she or Elmore fell to the floor.
“You idiotic bastard!” the newcomer shouted in a deep, disgusted voice. “I leave you alone for a few hours and you’re with some drunken floozy.”
“Hey, lady. I’m not drunk. He is.”
“Even worse!” the woman shouted. “Get out of here.”
“I just need to get my things together.” Starla was playing for time, wanting to record this interloper who apparently knew Lark well.
“Cheap whore! Go, or you’ll be sorry.”
“Just a minute. My—my purse.”
“Forget it. You’re not getting paid for anything.” There was a silence where all the rapt listeners could hear was heavy breathing from all parties involved.
“Bunnie, honey,” Elmore began wheedling.
“You’re not just a little out of it,” the new woman said. “You’re downright drunk. What did you tell her?”
“Nothin’, honey. I told her nothin’. I said nothin’, I told her I did nothin’ to those women, jest got dolled up a bit in those Red Hat duds. Even Dustin Hoffman does drag sometime.”
“Get outta here, you stupid chippie!” The woman obviously had Starla by the jacket lapels and was shaking her. “I oughtta wring your neck.”
“And she’s the one who did it!” Temple jumped up, only avoiding braining herself on the van’s ceiling by being so short. “Come on!”
Phyll and Judy put their weight into pushing the side van door open so all of them could pour out onto the hot pavement.
The two guys fiddling with the car suddenly jumped up and headed for the door, one pulling it open before Temple and company could reach it.
Starla had been leaning against the door. Around her neck was a Red Hat scarf. The strangling ends of it were in the hands of the long tall woman who’d popped in on Elmore Lark.
Losing the support of the door, Starla fell into the supportive custody of the man who’d jerked it open.
The other guy had the strange woman’s hands behind her back . . . and tied there with her own scarf in thirty seconds flat.
Elmore was weaving on his feet in the seedy motel room, clinging to a cheap plastic cup still in its plastic wrapper but filled with expensive scotch . . .
. . . which Temple was going to have a big bolt of when she got home.
They’d nailed the strangler, but Temple had never seen her before and had no idea on earth who the hell she was.
Chapter 61
Footnotes
Detective Morrie Alch came into the tiny LVMPD conference room where Temple, Electra, her Red-Hatted League sisters, and the two car guys, aka Armando and Ralph Fontana, were waiting.
He wore his scary, emotionless police face and his first words were: “Elmore sang like—excuse the expression—a lark.”
That broke the tension as the ladies laughed and eyed him with interest.
“Is it true, Miss Temple Barr,” he went on, “that you have no idea of who the woman who tried to strangle Starla is?”
“True, but I have a footnote.”
He chuckled, gazing at her deliberately dirty white tennis shoes.
“You usually have an interesting footnote, but I hope today it’s a lot better-looking than those skaggy tennies.”
“I’m working undercover, Detective,” she rebuked him. “You know I’d never be caught dead in these shoes otherwise.”
“At least you weren’t in danger of being caught dead this time.” He glanced at Starla. “I remember when you were doing bounty hunting, Miss Starnes. You always had a lot of nerve. This was a flea-brained and dangerous scheme,” he added with almost-Molina-like severity, looking back at Temple. “Fontana brothers in reserve or not.”
And where was Molina anyway? Temple wondered.
“So,” Alch asked her directly. “What is your footnote?”
“First, I have some papers to leave with you: my copy of Oleta’s full manuscript and my notes on Natalie Newman’s recordings, with a copy of both DVDs. But my ‘footnote’ is in the form of a statement, like on Jeopardy! ‘Dressed Elmore Lark in drag for his raid on the hatbox.’ ”
Alch’s law enforcement expression thawed again as he threw a wallet stuffed with credit cards and IDs down on the table.
“Right on, Little Red. And the question is: ‘Who is Candace Crenshaw?’ ”
Electra and her gal pals squealed as one. Their reactions were swift and universal.
“But she’s a Red Hat celebrity!”
“She performed at the convention.”
“She’s a star! What did she want with Elmore?” That was Electra.
“It’s complicated,” Alch said. “And it’ll come out at the trial. After Miss Barr found some references in Oleta’s manuscript, we checked some sources up north. Elmore was suddenly sitting on some very uranium-rich acres up there in Reno. A vengeful and illegitimate ex, not to mention other not-really-exes, not only confronted him with doing time for bigamy until death did him in at the prison, but the common-law wife and ex-wife legalities—once his good luck got out, and it would have—would tie up the land and the fortune for years.”
“What was Candy Crenshaw’s stake in all this?” Temple asked. “She seems to have come out of left field.”
“Not really, if you dig a bit. You found out she was a member of the same Red Hat group as Oleta. Say she’d become Elmore’s latest but secret swee
tie up in Reno, so when big money entered the picture, she wanted to be the wife of record with a legal claim to his bucks.”
“And Elmore would go along with this?” Electra was indignant.
“He’d always been a weasel and a fool for women. He did what she said down here, like shadowing Oleta. We don’t know if he knew she killed Oleta, but when Candy Crenshaw got what legal entitlements she wanted, he’d probably have been strangled by his bolo tie and left to rot in the desert.”
“Instead he’ll rot in prison,” Temple told Electra, who just shook her head, bewildered by both of them.
That was all that Alch was going to tell them for their trouble, so they left the busy, bustling building (murder was big business in Las Vegas) and stood outside in the hot sun, unwilling to just disband in an anticlimax.
The two Fontana brothers were the first to peel off, hunting a change of clothes and a close shave of a different sort than Starla’s.
Starla sighed as they watched them walk to the junker Impala. “I almost like the Brothers F more down and dirty and a little unshaven.” The other women murmured seconds, but Temple was too exhausted to join the chorus.
“I need to get home and get out of these disreputable jeans and sneakers,” Temple said. “And don’t nobody say they like me better this way.”
The Red-Hatted League linked arms and chanted, “We like you any way!”
“Thanks, doll!” Electra broke free to give Temple a hug that almost lifted her off her feet. “I can finally retire Elmore to the Dump of Dubious Exes.”
“Aren’t you coming back to the Circle Ritz with me?”
“No, I’m going out for a celebratory drink of Johnnie Walker scotch with the girls. You’re welcome to join us.”
“No, just bring me back to my Miata at the Crystal Phoenix.”
“I’ll take her back.” Alch was suddenly out on the sidewalk with them.
That broke up the gang.
“I want to talk to you privately,” he added, smiling to watch the other women scatter like squirrels in the presence of a cat. “Come on back up.”
Temple did.
The main room was still teaming with desks and detectives and intense talk and shrill phones ringing. Alch’s corner was just like that, and probably a perk. Even a lieutenant like Molina had only a tiny hidey-hole of an office.
Temple had been on red alert since arriving, but had not spotted a trace of Molina, although Su was glowering at her from another desk-computer setup.
“Get you some coffee?” Alch asked.
Temple had spied the large aluminum urn on her way in. The sides were spattered with dark brown spots and it was surrounded by stacks of foam cups and spilled packets of powder and granules that looked like a dope dealer’s rejects.
“No, thank you.”
“You look like you’ve been up all night.”
“Gee, thanks. I was.”
Alch softened. “That ring of yours still sparkles like the morning dew.”
“Thanks.” Temple had forgotten it and glanced at the reassuring rubies, red for truth and devotion. The color of love, of blood, of the Red Hat Sisterhood.
She saw her copies of the video recordings on Alch’s paper-covered desk.
“Why was Newman making a second set of recordings?” he asked now that no one was around to overhear.
“That’s her motive. I told you a little about it. Her mother joined the Red Hat Sisterhood. That was either proceeded by, or simultaneous with, Mollie Markowitz deciding that her marriage was stultifying and over with.”
“So. That happens every day all over the U.S. of A. That happened with my own marriage. And beg your pardon, Miss Barr, but ‘proceeded by’ and ‘simultaneous with.’ Are you testifying in court as an expert witness, or what?”
“I’m an expert video watcher now!”
“Aren’t we all nowadays?”
“You mean all the live TV news ‘chases.’ While Natalie was secretly taping another distorted side of the convention, she was inadvertently capturing someone else operating clandestinely.”
“How’d she do this secret recording?”
“Like the undercover TV news investigators do it. Concealed camera in a bag. They’re so small today. It’s a snap.”
“Why she’d do it?”
“Her motive. Her mother left her father after she joined the Red Hat group. Natalie was her father’s daughter. He’d been a newspaperman back in the days when print media mattered. I looked him up online. Jacob Markowitz, a crusading reporter of the old school, reporter’s notebooks and typewriter. Did some noteworthy stories on Vietnam vets when nobody wanted to look at their side of the story the public had sickened of. Sixty-seven years old. Retired. Expecting a calm life. He had a heart attack and died. Not uncommon for a retiring newspaperman. Deadlines will eat up your cardiac system. Natalie must have blamed her mother and the Red Hat Sisterhood, where the longtime homemaker suddenly started wanting to get around with the girls.”
“What did getting around with the girls mean?”
“Well, she met this male stripper. I bet it was just some silly, post-menopausal crush. If everybody had left it alone, it would have vanished. The Jersey Lily Redbirds chapter reported that Jacob demanded a divorce and Natalie came home to support him. Before the couple could divorce, or reconcile, Jacob died, the mother inherited the mantle of bereaved widow and the estate, and Natalie had a lot of scores to settle.”
“So someone at the Red Hat Sisterhood knew she was doing them a dirty turn and talked about it, tipping off Candace?”
“My aunt Kit, an ex-actress, tipped me off about the camera. But Candace, having murdered once, was probably watching us all like a red-and-purple hawk.”
“Your aunt. Aldo’s new girlfriend.”
“Right.” Temple waited for him to comment on the age difference, given that it mirrored what Mollie Markowitz had done.
“Cool lady,” was all Alch said. “Might have asked her out myself if I wanted to ruffle some Fontana feathers.”
“Don’t mention feathers! I have seen enough of them at this convention to even swear off pillows plumped with the stuff.”
Alch chuckled. “So what did you find on that video recording?”
“I didn’t see it at first, but I was looking at the unflattering portrayal of the Red Hat Sisterhood, which is an indirect client of mine.”
He nodded.
“Last night I went through sections frame by frame in that clever stop-action mode that DVD players have.”
“You can run a DVD player? This new technology has me beat. Lucky Matt Devine. Can you program a TiVo? I might offer him some competition.”
“I can run it because a Fontana brother gave me an extensive short course, Detective. I’m not a techie, either.”
“I’m crushed, but you’re a credit to your gender anyway.”
“I slowed down the segments of them setting up the convention shops, before Oleta’s body was discovered, and the segments before the Black Hat/Red Hat debate.”
Alch nodded seriously, all joshing over.
“I found some things I think Natalie did too. Only she made the mistake of doing something about them.”
“Blackmail?”
“Right.”
“That will get a body killed. It’s a rewarding crime, because if you shut up the source, the entire problem goes away forever. What’d you spot, kid?”
“Elmore Lark.”
“We’ve processed the physical evidence around Newman’s body. Nothing ties Elmore Lark into it.”
Temple sighed. “Natalie’s video ties him into Oleta’s murder scene, and the attempt on his own life.”
“How?”
“I didn’t see it until several run-throughs, but he’s one of the hotel setup guys working on Oleta’s booth. He’s wearing a painter’s jumpsuit and cap, but it’s clearly Elmore.”
“And—?”
“She caught him on video before the debate, by the hall drinking
fountain, gulping down some sort of capsule.”
“You mean he didn’t chew the poison, but took it before?”
“Right. He could probably control the dose better. And, from the recording, he seems to be faking the collapse. Probably to make it look worse than it was.”
“Trying to poison himself is just stupid, it’s not a crime. And the Black Hat Brotherhood is a protest group. They might have sent a member in undercover. None of this proves anything.”
“It proves Natalie could have tried to blackmail him, which drove Candace to kill her.”
“Why?”
Temple had to think about that one. “Maybe Natalie didn’t try to blackmail him. Maybe she recognized she had a big story in her little camera. Maybe she tried to interview him, get some more prime video, and gave away that she knew too much. She didn’t know when to stop. She’d been pretty heavy-handed about filming the convention.
“Of course, Elmore would tell Candy. He was penny-ante, and so were his schemes. All he wanted, I think, was to keep his errant wives out of the picture up in Reno. He wanted to see and get Oleta’s book because the bigamist charge would alert Electra to their legitimate marriage and her stake in his property. He must have searched Oleta’s house in Reno after she came down here, for the book and not found it.”
“We searched the house after her death,” Alch admitted. “There was a computer, but the hard drive was missing.”
“Right. Elmore disabled the computer, but didn’t find a printout there, so that’s why he was hanging around the Hatorium setup hoping to search the stuff Oleta brought down here. When Electra was discovered with her body, he faked his own poisoning to help get Electra sent upriver. He may even have thought Electra did the deed. With both of them out of the way, in his limited way of figuring it, the fortune in uranium was his to splurge on a grasping woman like Candace Crenshaw. Reno’s always been a big uranium area; I bet Candy found out about his land before he did.
“His expedition in Candy’s clothes to snag the hatbox was his own hot idea, I bet. She may have let him do it, but mainly to muddy the waters about the death of Natalie Newman, whom she’d always recognized as a bigger threat than the police. She attacked my aunt, thinking it was me, to muddy the waters even more, using the scarf I’d bought at Oleta’s booth and left in the conference room. Notice how those Red Hat outfits make everyone look alike at first glance? Candy was just another anonymous leaf in a forest, and she could always throw Elmore to the wolves if someone came too close to suspecting her.
Cat in a Red Hot Rage Page 31
