And now he was walking toward her, black eyes narrowed like a hunting hawk’s.
Temple tried to pretend she hadn’t noticed him. As she turned to veer in the opposite direction, though, he somehow ended up as a roadblock. She had to stop—or careen into him. And physical contact with Molina’s bad-apple ex-cop SO was to be avoided at all costs.
The so-called Joe was still staring at her. “I know you.”
“No, you don’t.” She tried to weave past but he held up a hand. She stopped rather than crash into it chest first.
This was the only man she had ever seen put the fear of the Lord into her own intrepid SO, Max Kinsella. And Max was a pro at skullduggery and derring-do. Temple was just a gifted amateur.
“I know you.” Nadir stared at her face, and glanced down to take her measure.
He was the creepiest guy she’d ever met, a cross between the mad guru Jim Jones, who’d poisoned all his followers in Guyana three decades ago, and Qaddafi. He had that same dark Mideastern handsomeness that age was melting into the face of a corpse laid out for viewing, something once good gone terribly wrong.
Molina had told Max, reluctantly, that Nadir was a rogue L.A. cop driven off the force. It took some doing to be driven off the L.A. force, from what Temple had heard. But Nadir had been turning up in all the wrong places in Las Vegas lately. That was especially bad news for Molina, who had hoped she and their daughter, Mariah, had vanished from his life years ago, before he even knew he had a daughter.
Nadir’s forefinger pointed at Temple’s naked face like a gun barrel. “Starts with a T.”
“What?” Temple’s icky thoughts had scared her into a distracted state.
“Your name.”
How could he know her name? She had crossed paths with him when she was investigating the clubs in search of the Stripper Killer, but that guy had been caught—trying to abduct Temple—when she had laid him low with her pepper spray. Sure, Nadir had come on the scene and decked the guy after, but she had been wearing a long brown wig that, thankfully, had stayed firmly pinned on during the entire incident.
And she’d used a pseudonym in the clubs, posing as a seller of lingerie to strip off.
“Tess!” he said. “Tess the Thong Girl.”
Temple glanced around to see if any of her temporary bosses were within hearing distance. She’d thought that undercover persona of hers was safely history, along with the armful of stripper unitards that she sold by the spandex yard at the clubs while hunting the Stripper Killer. So had anyone heard this revealing challenge? Thankfully, no. Worryingly, no.
“That’s who you are,” he said. “I never forget a face, even if the hair over it changes.”
Temple decided to embrace the moment. “Yeah, but that’s not who I really am.”
“Who are you, then?”
She realized she did not, absolutely not, want to give him her real name.
“Well, I wasn’t who you thought I was.”
“I get that.” He looked around. “This looks like your kind of crowd, the upscale pricks and princesses who live the chichi life.”
“Oh, no, I’m just a working girl.” Wrong phrase.“I mean, an ordinary Jill who works for a living. I’m a . . . secretary. Sort of.”
“What were you doing in the clubs, then?”
“It’s true, what I told you then. Sort of. My sister was involved. She danced a little and, with the Stripper Killer loose, I was worried about her.”
He nodded, coming to the conclusion she’d desperately been implying. “So you got the crazy idea of going undercover in the clubs? If you hadn’t been carrying that pepper spray, babe, you’da been strangled with your own spandex unitards.”
“Hey, you know what they’re called. That’s pretty impressive.”
“I spend a lot of time in the clubs, doing security.”
“You did come along just in time to save my skin.”
“Yeah.” When he smiled his face lost some of its sinister cast. “What were you thinkin’? Little girl like you takin’ on the Stripper Killer. You went right over and sat with me before that. I was a strange guy. You ought to be more careful.”
Yes, Temple had risked a lot to sit down and try to pump Rafi Nadir. He was the only man to instill fear in both Max and their bête noir in blue, figuratively speaking, homicide lieutenant C.R. Molina, who were the two most formidable people Temple knew. One she loved, the other she loathed. Not hard to say which was which!
“Anyway,” Rafi was saying, “you look a little harried. I guess they have you running your ass all over the place on opening night. You deserve a rest. Why don’t you sit down on this, uh”—he stared at an ostrich-pattern ottoman shaped like a giant mushroom—“leather thing and I’ll get you a glass of wine. Red or white?”
“Ah . . . white. Please. Thank you. Joe.”
“My name’s really Rafi. This is just a cover.” His thumb and forefinger flicked the name tag, dismissive. “They call me Raf.”
“Thanks. Raf.”
Temple sat as directed, no longer harried, or worried, but amazed.
When opportunity falls into your lap, and comes bearing free wine in a plastic glass . . . you’d better play along and learn something.
“Won’t they miss you?” she asked when Rafi returned with the proper-colored wine.
“Nah. Tonight the security’s for show. What they’re really worried about happens when things are quieter.”
“Really? What?”
“Can’t talk about that. So. What’s a nervy little secretary like you doing with a stripper for a sister?”
“It happens in the best of families.”
“I did security for a lot of the clubs. Would I know her?”
“Maybe, but’s she’s back in Wisconsin now. That killer scare made her finally go home and make peace with the folks.”
He nodded. “Usually you can’t go home again, someone said. I sure can’t. Strippers don’t often make it. You must be a good example. Anybody cared enough about me to risk her neck in a strip club with a killer at large, I’d be real grateful. You’re a ballsy little broad.”
Temple tried hard not to blush at such heartfelt praise. All three words set her teeth on edge, although she did sort of cotton to “ballsy.” Wait’ll she told Max.
Then again, maybe she wouldn’t tell Max that she was Rafi Nadir’s new poster girl.
“You know,” he went on, waving his hand at the crowd, “I can’t sit down, by the way. Duty—but, you know, it’s real hard to turn a stripper around. When I was a cop, you’d try to get them to testify on something, or report a DV, and they just wouldn’t do it.”
“DV?”
“Domestic violence. That’s why I burned out on police work. It was a losing battle, and even your fellow officers and the brass couldn’t do any good.”
Well! Rafi Nadir as a misunderstood knight in blue? It was just possible, Temple thought. She never liked to believe the Gospel according to Molina, and according to Molina, Nadir was a brute worth keeping away from twelve-year-old Mariah even at the cost of her mother’s career.
Poles. Positive and negative. His truth and her truth. Both possibly right, and right about each other?
“So why’d you leave police work?” Temple, the ex-TV reporter, asked. “Burnout I can understand. But it must have been something more.”
Rafi surveyed the crowd, more to avoid looking her in the eye than for surveillance purposes, Temple guessed.
“I had a partner. Not a job partner, a personal one. She, uh, was the right gender and the right minority. Went up like a helium balloon. I was the wrong minority and the wrong gender. I got sick of the hypocrisy. I left.”
“The job or the significant other?”
“Both.” He looked back at her. Shrugged. “I helped her at first. Built her confidence, clued her in. Didn’t see it coming. Then it was Hasta la vista, baby. She split so fast and so totally I couldn’t even find her to ask why.”
Temple didn’t
like the raw edge in Raf’s voice. It was angry and it was honest. He said. She said. The same old story, quest for love and glory. As time goes by. He was Bogart; Molina was Bergman. Not! Temple had an overactive theatrical imagination. She’d be the first to admit it.
“But that’s bygones,” Rafi said, smiling.
Smiling at her!
“You got an address?”
No, she lived under a Dumpster! Now what, ballsy little broad? she asked her nervier self.
Now Matt Devine to the rescue.
He had eased onto the scene like Cool Hand Luke. “Sorry to interrupt,” he told Temple, nodding impersonally at Nadir. “Some ceremony at the central atrium where the car is. They need you.”
Temple jumped up. “Sorry,” she told Rafi. “Gotta run.”
His lips tightened, his expression saying thanks for reminding him that he was just scummy hired help and had no business talking to a woman whose life he had saved.
“I enjoyed talking to you,” Temple said in farewell.
And she had. She had really enjoyed learning that the Molina scenario might have another side.
Still, she was glad to go off with Matt.
“Who was that guy?” he was asking as suspiciously as Max would. “He sure was monopolizing you.”
“Do they really want me anywhere?”
“Yeah.” Matt stopped now that Rafi Nadir was three vignettes behind them and out of sight. “I do. Here.”
“Really.” Temple wondered what a genuine ballsy little broad would say to a provocative statement like that.
Hot Sauce
“This place gives me the creeps,” Matt said. “Not to mention the company you were just keeping.” He looked around the elegant, empty rooms. “Is there any place we can talk confidentially?”
“Any place that isn’t orange. That’s the fashion statement of the evening, and that’s where people congregate. Hey. There’s a green office vignette just next door. A designer named Kelly did it.”
“Good.” Matt took Temple’s elbow to usher her into the adjoining vignette. He urged her into a corner behind a huge entertainment center—in an office?
The nook was cosy and intimate and Temple could see that Matt was too upset to see just where he’d placed them.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“This place. The whole . . . mood feels wrong. Half the employees seem to be trolling around to attack the other half.”
“You’ve never worked for a large company, I see.”
“And who was that thug you were chatting up?”
“You didn’t give me time to introduce you. And I was hardly chatting him up. He waylaid me. Like you did just now. What’s really bothering you?”
Matt looked over his shoulder and shook his head. “I don’t know. I think I was just sort of hit on.”
“Well, it can’t have been me, or you’d have noticed. Janice? She looks like such a reserved lady. . . .”
“Not Janice! Someone else I don’t even know.”
“That’s been known to happen.”
“Not to me. I’ve got some sort of psychic Teflon coating. People don’t mess with me that way.”
“ ‘People.’ Ah. It was a guy.”
He looked disappointed that she figured it out. “Yeah. I mean, I’m just standing there. . . .
“Highly inciting. Shouldn’t do it.”
“Temple!”
“You’re not responsible for other people’s actions, or reactions. Forget about it.”
“It’s hard,” he admitted after half a minute. “Here I’ve got Jerome from seminary hanging around, and—”
“Didn’t you get this sort thing in the seminary? From the recent news—”
“No. I didn’t. I walked under this Teflon umbrella all through it. A lot of us did. Calling us naive hardly begins to describe it. It’s just that I’ve seen Janice and Jerome lit into by some witch on wheels, and now I see you getting cosy with Jabba the Hut in a corner . . . all you’re missing is the chain-mail bikini.”
“I can get one,” Temple said brightly.
“What?”
“A chain-mail bikini. I know a guy in the desert, name of Mace. He custom makes them. Knives too.”
“Temple. That was just a figure of speech. And how did you run into an outlaw character like that?”
“I have my ways. Matt, lighten up! This is the opening event for a big new commercial venture. People are going to be nervous. They are going to be crabby. They are going to be paranoid.”
“You think I’m overreacting.”
“Did I say that?”
“No. But I knew what you were thinking.”
“Then will you get it for me for Christmas?”
He sighed then, and really looked at her. “You’re right. This other stuff is mostly nothing. I was worried about who I saw you with.”
“I wasn’t worried about who I saw you with.”
“No?” He stepped a little closer as all expert interrogators do. “She said you were.”
“She did?”
“Who?”
“Whoever we’re talking about.”
Temple realized that they hadn’t been this near, or this alone, since a close encounter in the hallway to her apartment before everything went to hell a couple weeks ago. If you could call having everyone you know involved in a suspicious death “hell.”
“Look,” she said. “It’s been a rough couple of weeks. I think everyone is a little edgy. I was supposed to be finding my meal ticket. Apparently something is ‘Wong’ in the Maylords world right now.”
“That’s a terrible pun, but I guess she deserves it, from what you’ve implied. So what’s keeping you?”
Temple shrugged, and waited for him to catch on.
He stepped back. “Sorry. Guess the paranoia is catching.”
She scooted around him and hit heels to travertine to head for the front of the store.
She wasn’t surprised Matt was a little gun-shy after all he’d been through with his truly terrifying stalker. This crowd was trendy and filled with temperamental artist types. Temperamental artist types were often in-your-face. Kind of like Amelia Wong. Actually, Wong remained a cipher. It was her staff that was in-your-face.
Speaking of which, Temple had no sooner touched toe to the festive central area than she saw Amelia Wong finally facing off with someone in person. That someone was her Asian opposite: master chef Song of the Crystal Phoenix.
Call him Yang (although Temple had never known his first name). Call him Yang can cook. Call her Yin. Call her Yin-Yang can’t abide disharmony.
Call this a Zen shoot-out.
Kenny Maylord noticed Temple’s presence with a huge relieved sigh and came skittering over on the QT. “Thank God. She’s rearranging his buffet table and he looks ready to restyle her hair-do with his chopping cleaver.”
“Never argue with a chef. They’re armed and dangerous.”
“Can you do anything with them? The TV videographers have been eating up this unpleasant scene.”
Temple braved a gantlet of four-hundred-watt lighting to enter the fray, which was spotlit by the small sun of a TV camera light.
“Can I help?” she asked.
Chef Song, who knew her by sight as the PR rep for his employer, the Crystal Phoenix Hotel and Casino, stopped gesticulating like an armed windmill. He folded his arms, and cleaver, across his chest.
“This lady changes my buffet.”
“This man,” Wong said, “offends the inner yin with the inharmonious color of his arrangement. I cannot allow people to eat from such an ungoverned display.”
“Food is set out delicately,” said Chef Song, “in a fan of flavor, like scented flowers in a garden. Color is in second place.”
“The eye and spirit must always be paramount.”
“What does a movie company have to do with Song’s buffet table? Only movie company in Las Vegas is the MGM-Grand Hotel and the three-story lion out front would make you eat yo
ur foolish words, if he were here.”
Temple took a deep breath. Chef Song was first-generation Chinese. His grasp of the language in times of stress grew colorful, to say the least. She knew his history. He had been an enormously wealthy Hong Kong businessman who had lost everything at the gaming tables . . . and then had reinvented himself in midlife in a foreign country as a chef. The career change had been fortuitous. He attacked his new role with youthful passion.
Apparently his commitment had found some answering passion in that media ice maiden, Amelia Wong. Ms. Wong’s American first name was the hallmark these days of a second- or third-generation Asian-American torn between two worlds and doing quite spectacularly in both, thank you.
“Shrimp can be here,” Amelia Wong declared. “Shrimp is orange and delicate in taste. Pork must be to the extremes. It is strong and earthy.”
“Sweet and sour,” he riposted. “Sauce for each dish is sweet-and-sour. You keep sweet-and-sour together. For balance. As with yang and yin.”
“Yin and yang. You can’t even get that right.”
“I have get everything all right until you come on scene.”
Temple considered that many a feng shui client might think the same thing after a domestic makeover according to Wong.
People were generally torn between acting as immobile as a herd of sheep or snapping up every convenient trend that sprang up around them like clover. And so they were ready to knock over the traces and leave the trends behind in an empty pasture . . . with other, earthier leavings.
“Isn’t there some compromise?” Temple asked, stepping between the combatants.
He said: “No. Food does not compromise. Chef never compromise.”
She said: “How can one compromise with divine harmony?”
Temple lowered her voice. “Listen. Maylords is paying you both princely sums to enhance their opening festivities. Surely the universe of divine harmony recognizes fiscal balance. Bottom line? Checkbook?”
“Principle,” Ms. Wong declared through grape-glossed lips, “is everything.”
“In financial matters as well as spiritual ones,” Temple pointed out.
Ms. Wong received this observation in silence.
Hooray, Temple had rung a bell. Maybe on a cash register.
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