Temple forgot about her harem of dark-haired men. It seemed to her that blue-haired Miss Welk could possibly be even more lethal to anyone who naysayed her dangerous visions.
"That's all," Agatha said, handing Temple back the cup with the soggy dark leaf residue coating its bottom third.
This was the end of an audience, so Temple took up her cup, wrapped it in a napkin and stowed it in her tote bag.
Miss Welk raised wispy eyebrows but said nothing. Temple wondered if she had seen in the leaves that Temple would have it studied by an expert, wait to see if she developed any sudden stomach cramps and then wash it and return it--anonymously--to the hotel.
Probably not, she decided, turning over her shoulder to say farewell and surprising a look of concentrated venom on the old dear's face.
Chapter 32
On to the Oscar's
Temple had found time to go home to change--and wasn't sure what to wear.
According to Agatha Welk with her phalanx of lurking short and medium-tall dark men, chain mail wouldn't be enough protection. On the other hand, romance as well as danger could strike with the suddenness of a shot in the dark. What did the daring young up-and-coming entrepreneur wear to a combination execution-escapade?
Temple seldom wore slacks because they made her look like a lost Girl Scout rather than like a Femme Fatale ready for love or death on the run. She decided, though, that a toreador appearance would allow for quick escapes if not escapades, so she slithered into a pair of shiny stirrup tights (size small) she had found on sale for $3.98, strappy black patent heels, a red knit cummerbund and a snappy red knit "Bolero" bolero with official-looking brass buttons.
The Mirage's moving sidewalk was teeming with tourists and she was soon skimming past the teeming fish tanks to one of the hotel's many eateries and drinkeries.
At the entrance to the Black Spot bar she hesitated, studying a dim landscape of tables populated with unfamiliar faces. It was like trying to tell one sergeant-major fish from another.
Actually, now that she peered at the clientele, a lot of them did look a little fishy.
One, however, waved a fin ... that is, a hand, and she sped to where it still waved, hoping she hadn't been taken for a cocktail waitress in this getup, which might be a bit much, but, hey, either love or murder was waiting in her tea leaves and now was no time to dress drably.
She came to such a screeching halt at Oscar Grant's table that when she slung her red patent-leather tote bag around to put it on the floor she nearly decked him as he rose to pull out a chair.
Temple scooted into the chair and slang the bag (was that the proper tense?) on the long-unoccupied chair at the table. Why was she always almost-late to these crucial love-and-death affairs? She smiled at Oscar Grant like a cruising lady shark.
"Sorry I'm late. I thought I'd never get away from Agatha Welk. She was reading my tea leaves."
His mustache curled with unspoken scorn for the person under discussion, a nice trick that only Geraldo Rivera had also mastered.
"Agatha!" He laughed. "Always lagging behind the times. Tea leaves are passe."
"I don't doubt it. Reading cigarette ashes would make so much more sense nowadays, except that smokers are a vanishing breed too. Oh, you smoke, I see." Temple followed the sinuous updraft of blue haze trailing from a brass tray. "My, that is a most revealing ash--"
Oscar Grant swiftly took care of revealing ashes by grinding the cigarette out in its own excrement, so to speak.
"I hope you won't believe anything Agatha tells you," he said. "She really is in another world."
"I thought that was the idea?"
"For Agatha, it's not simply a world Beyond. It's a world Beyond Belief."
"Aren't you the organizer, though? Why invite her, then?"
"She was available on short notice, and lives nearby. Now. Let's talk about the real world."
He smiled, slid the ashtray toward the unoccupied seat and fixed very dark, very liquid, very under-caffeinated eyes on her. "How did your medium hunt go?"
"Sighted psychics, sank same. All I learned was that everyone is different. Why do you include Professor Mangel, though?"
"His eternal, dry-as-mummy-dust academic papers on the sub ject lend a certain legitimacy in the eyes of the media. But I wouldn't listen to much he had to say on the subject, any subject, if I were you. He's much too involved to be objective."
"And you're not?"
"Of course I'm not. I'm a journalist. I believe that you were one too."
"Oh? How do you know that?"
Oscar smiled and took her hand, turning it over to study the palm, or maybe the absence of rings. "Not by reading palms or tea leaves, that's for sure. I asked your friend Electra when everyone was setting up the psychic fair last Thursday morning."
"About me? I'm impressed."
He shook his head. "Don't be. I'm afraid it's my job to know who's booking space at a Dead Zones taping."
"You taped the seance for your TV show?"
Oscar nodded, a sleek, smiling Cheshire cat with a mustache painted on his muzzle. A very smug mustache. Temple wondered if Max would grow a mustache next in the interests of disguise.
Oscar's forefinger traced her... lifeline... loveline? When she got home, she would have to get a book from the library to find out. Seduction tickled, which was probably the idea. His, not hers. But then again, if the tea leaves decreed ... A shame she had neglected to estimate his height when he had stood up to greet her. Maybe he was the short dark man who would aid her out of the blue Beyond rather than the medium-tall dark man who would sweep her off her feet. Suspecting the future was worse than suspecting murder. At least you never expected to see murder suspects again.
"What else did you discover about our circle of psychics?" he was asking a little too casually.
Who wanted to interrogate whom here? "Mynah is... interesting; at least she has created a fascinating environment."
"Oh, you visited her at home! Good. Quite the place. I did a half-show feature on Mynah and her way-out wonderland last season. Yes, every detail is to Mynah's specification. A fascinating woman."
Hold my hand and praise a New Age bimbo; I think not! Especially when you're not admitting having been married to her. If he wasn't Mr. Right, then Oscar Grant was definitely a candidate for Mr. Very Wrong.
Temple extracted her hand from his custody by the simple stratagem of picking up the table top plastic easel containing a lush color advertisement for the Drink of the Day. "An Under the Volcano. Clever."
. "That ersatz volcano outside is a terrific trademark," he agreed, seeming to survive the withdrawal of her dainty extremity. "Mediums could learn a lot from Las Vegas. You need the proper ambience before you can expect anything outstanding to happen. It's as true of seances as of gambling casinos."
"A novel attitude. And how do you grade the ambience of our seance?"
Oscar shifted unconsciously to work a pack of cigarettes from his side pocket. "Not as good as I had hoped when I set it up. The activity outside seemed to upset some of the more delicate psychics, like Agatha. She insisted Houdini was a shadow of himself, quite literally. But the old boy looks pretty impressive on tape."
"How did you tape the session? Only the cameraman/photographer from the Scoop was there--Oh!" She had caught his apologetic smirk as he lit the long, thin spike of cigarette with a long, thin gold lighter. "He was a double agent, filming for Crawford's Hot Heads segment, and yours."
"Very good."
Temple hated people who rewarded correct deductions with "good dog" type comments. Oscar must be a villain in disguise. He nodded, as if agreeing with her thoughts, when he was only confirming her guess, " Hot Heads--dreadful name--only needs a few sound bites. I can drop in some real segments. It'll help Wayne's career to get a credit for my show."
"But what's to show? I hear Crawford's vaunted 'scoop' the other night was fakey photographs on fog. And I agree with you about the name Hot Heads. I think they meant to
imply hot headlines about 'hot' talking heads in the entertainment industry. Instead it sounds like it's about blow-dryers plugged in too long."
Grant's laugh was flatteringly hearty and went on a tad too long.
"What a sharp cookie you are, Temple. If you want to move to the ghost beat, just let me know. I bet you look cute as a cupcake on camera."
"Sharp as a gingersnap and jolly as a jellybean," she answered, smiling.
He took her hand again. "So what did you think of our psychics?"
"Professor Mangel seemed sincere, but he's hardly a psychic. I got the impression he's hoping to be there when one of them hits pay dirt."
"A hanger-on, but useful."
"And D'Arlene Hendrix is so normal she could run for mayor."
He shook his head.
"No?"
"No. That lady is a human bloodhound when it comes to finding murder victims. They may be half there, but she's never been wrong about where they were. Says she 'hears' them calling to her. They direct her. If so, she's in touch with the most terrifying of after-death phenomena: spirits who have made no peace with their disembodied state. What did she say about the seance?"
"She was.. .reticent. Said she saw something, but won't say what. Won't even indicate if it was tangible or, you know.. .doo-doo doodah." Temple hummed the ancient Twilight Zone theme music.
"That's why Dead Zones doesn't use any gimmicky theme music. Just a quick montage of past pieces and a quick cut to me as the reporter. I do come off pretty 'documentary,' don't I?"
"Oh, Geraldo couldn't do it better."
"Thanks." He looked down to flick a half-inch of ash into the banished tray. The coat sleeve on the smoking hand had pulled up, and Temple glimpsed a tattoo of... She peered. He noticed.
He chose to mistake curiosity for personal interest.
"You like my bracelet?"
The bracelet, which Temple had not noticed, was a suitably masculine (whatever that was) gold-chain affair worth a cool couple grand from a discount jeweler, but it obscured the tattoo.
Not enough, however, to have hidden a ragged, two-color homemade look that didn't go with anything else on Oscar Grant's body. Oh, if only Molina were on this case! Temple could have dangled that tattoo in front of her until she became so irritated she growled back an explanation. Temple's own scenario was not particularly romantic: prison or gang days. She detected a lot of unsanded edges behind Oscar Grant's Gillette-smooth exterior.
"Very nice," she said finally, not sure whether she referred to the bracelet and was lying, or referred to the tattoo and was thinking how nice it was to have spotted it. Agatha Welk had mentioned nothing about a tattoo, not even on the "Hell's Angel" Temple was supposedly dating. The next idea (Matt Devine with a tattoo) was so ludicrous that she couldn't help smiling.
"What is it?" Oscar shook her hand playfully, thinking she was smiling with the pure joy of his company, or perhaps that of his fancy gold bracelet.
If only he knew! She could picture Matt with a huge red outline of a heart over his heart: instead of reading "mom" it said "Mother Superior." Her smile struggled to become a grin. Or ...
"Born to Raise Relief Funds." Or ... better yet, "Born to Bless."
Oscar leaned forward to tease an answer out of her and his right cuff pulled up even higher.
"Deathreats" read the letters upside down, which Temple had learned to do when serving as a high school intern on her local weekly shopper, which had still been set in hot lead then. An elderly printer had been kind enough to teach her the trick. Death threats, or Death rats? Either way, it was an ugly sentiment to engrave into your epidermis.
"Well? Are you going to tell me?" Grant was still smiling behind the Black Bart mustache.
"Oh, it's something one of the psychics said. Nonsense, no doubt."
He shook her hand again and smiled.
Temple shook back and smiled more. "It's silly ... one claims that the Houdini we saw was a fake, but that there was another, real apparition--"
"A fake!" He dropped her hand like it was a dead cigarette. "That's nuts. I've got prime footage on that appearance. What loose cannon is making those kinds of charges? My show on this seance will make the November sweeps, you just watch. You do watch Dead Zones? "
"I will now," Temple confessed, shyly tucking her chin into her chest like a good silent-screen star.
Oscar bought the act the way she had almost bought Houdini. "And what 'real' apparition?
These flakes, always embroidering on a good scheme. Hams on Wonder bread. They should keep their eyes and mouths on what they came to see, to evoke. Houdini in the flesh, or at least the phantasm. He looked real to you, didn't he?"
"He looked real odd. Did he truly ask to be put in all those irons?"
"Absolutely. He was the first Iron Man athlete. Loved to be locked up. Loved it almost as much as Mama. Kind of makes you wonder about his childhood, doesn't it?"
Temple nodded, all eyes and smiles. Thanks to her appreciative act, Grant's cynicism was finally shining through like a piece of unadulterated aluminum foil in a recycling bin. She knew he was too good to be true to Agatha's tea leaves. Now she decided to show him that she was being too good to be true too, by telling him what she really thought.
"Kind of makes you wonder," she said, "who doctored the photo and arranged for it to be projected onto the dry-ice mist in the chimney. If it wasn't a cover for Gandolph the Great's murder, what was it?"
Oscar, struck silent by contradiction, stared at Temple as if she had suddenly turned into a cobra. She would have thought he'd be used to the effect from associating with Mynah.
When he finally spoke, he was furious, and his attraction to her hand had turned into a clamp on the wrist. "It was a damn good show theme, that's what! And keep your mouth shut about any theories--"
He got no further.
A tall--well, mostly medium-tall--dark man had materialized at Temples right.
"Watch yer langwidge around a lady," a Fontana brother intoned in singsong John Wayne-style.
"Yeah," said another medium-tall, dark man who had appeared on Temple's left. "Unhand that dame."
Oscar's grip relaxed, then his hand crept back, but not before the man behind him slammed a stiletto into the tabletop right between the webbing of skin separating his first and second fingers. -
A truly classic cinematic moment, Temple thought. Count on the Fontana brothers to bring a sort of hokey brio to all their works.
"Hey, sorry, hombre. Just doing my nails and the razor slipped. But I didn't finish reading your wrist." Ralph (he had a matching minirazor swinging from his left earlobe) Fontana grabbed Grant's wrist and held it to the light: the light being the candle that had flamed behind a glass funnel on the cocktail table. Now the funnel was off and the candle dripped hot wax on the tender inside of Grant's wrist.
Poor Oscar writhed, but not before Ralph pronounced: "Deathreaters. That was the punk L.
A. outfit a dozen years ago. All needles and no nuts. S'cuse," he tossed to Temple before slamming Oscar's wrist, now bare of its gold chain, back to the table.
"Nice," the Fontana at Temple's left shoulder told the glowering man, "that you've started leaving such classy tips for the help around here. These waitresses work their tails off for peanuts." He turned to Temple. "Now what are you doing here in such low company when you're in high demand elsewhere? Come along, miss. I am sure that we can find some honest work for you at the mission."
She was hustled away, leaving Oscar to nurse his naked, but still tattooed wrist.
"What're you doin' at a place like this?" Ralph asked in aggrieved tones from behind them as Temple left flanked by brothers twain.
"Interviews. And the Mirage is top of the heap."
"Yeah, but look at the class of the heap. That guy's a phony."
"I know! That's why I wanted to interview him."
"But he was slobbering all over your manicure," another brother (she thought Aldo) told her.
"M
anicures can be touched up. Information is hard to come by."
"Well, we didn't like what we saw."
"I gather. How did you figure on the tattoo?"
"He had that L.A. look. Besides, we were keeping a very close watch on you." Ralph pointed up to the ceiling.
"Eye in the sky? You were watching us on the security camera?"
Ralph basked in the fact that she appreciated the feat.
"We know a few folks in this town; big folks, not-so-big folks. And who knows a Fontana, owes a Fontana."
"Well, I owe you a great big thank-you for jumping in when I smashed Mr. Grant's bubble; he was turning a trifle physical."
"I thought this guy was supposed to be a physic," Aldo complained, turning to frown back at Grant, who was vanishing behind a smog of smoke. "You need an escort anywhere?"
"Pepe's Pizza?"
"Aw, Miss Temple, that ain't real pizza pie. You should stay away from those slick franchise joints. Where's your car?"
"In the lot."
"We'll see you to it. It's dark."
"Boys, it's often dark in Las Vegas and I'm often out in it all by myself."
"Not when we're around." Ralph opened a set of double exit doors so his brothers wouldn't have to squeench their well-padded shoulders to accompany her through, and stepped back.
"Luckily for you," she said, "I was almost done."
"Hey, lucky for us we ran into you."
Eduardo (she thought) took her car key when she dug it out and opened the Storm. Aldo brushed off the seat before she sat. Ralph finished cleaning his nails while he bent to make sure her headlights were working.
"Now lock yourself in." Eduardo gave a finger waggle that spotlighted his Roman glass ring.
They stood in a line like French Legionnaires and waved as she put the car into gear and headed out.
Temple waved back. They were fairly tall, dark and plural. Definitely in the running for romance. Was it possible that fate would cut one out of the herd just for her? She couldn't ask for a better escort service.
No way. She shook her head and headed for the take-out pizza place, still dreaming up fantasy tattoos for Matt Devine.
Cat with an Emerald Eye Page 28
