Cat in an Orange Twist

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Even Matt.

  Who’d gone and found himself somebody while she’d been trying to make the monogamous relationship she’d had work with one half of it often AWOL. Darn it! Max hadn’t told her about his shadow life until it suddenly drove him away. Now that he was back he kept promising they’d have a full-time relationship again. At first, Max’s hit-and-run surreptitious midnight visits had seemed Zorro-ish and swashbuckling. Now she just felt nervous when she wondered when, or if, he would come around.

  Matt, though, was everywhere she turned lately, and she was getting way too used to that.

  Maybe she was just jittery today because Janice reminded her of a college dean, one of those sensibly attired, even-tempered female authority figures that always had you worrying that your Inadequacy Quotient was showing. Temple’s IQ was sky high, in both senses of the initials.

  Temple eyed the sunlit door again. A tall figure darkened it. At least it wasn’t Molina, the other looming Mother Superior figure in her life.

  Wait! Wasn’t Janice a divorced mother of two? Hadn’t Temple heard Matt say something about Janice needing to support her kids? Both Molina and Flanders were mothers! And Temple was not. Temple was nowhere near being mother to anything more than Midnight Louie, and—so help her, Lassie—Louie did not need a mother!

  Neither did Temple. She had a perfectly good, well-intentioned, overanxious mother far away in Minneapolis.

  Still, maybe she was a bit oversensitive to the earth-mother type, because she wasn’t one and never would be.

  When Janice finally saw Temple and approached the table, Temple had summed her up. “Junoesque” was the word to describe Janice. She wasn’t as tall as Molina, but looked as annoyingly competent. Her clothing, though, was both soft and sensuous, and arty. She looked at first sight like an Interesting Person.

  Temple could see Matt responding to that benign maternal temperament. Heck, if Janice were Catholic, she would be a perfect model for the Virgin Mary . . . after having been married with children in the twenty-first century.

  Temple needed to find out if she was Catholic.

  Janice loomed over the tabletop, setting various dishes on it without spilling anything, including the tall plastic glass of iced tea.

  Competent and coordinated. Drat!

  “How are you?” Janice asked first, sounding concerned.

  Of course. Temple had a front-row seat when the corpse had showed up.

  “Fine,” Temple said. “We could have met someplace upscale, but I didn’t want to run into any Maylords execs, or the Wong faction either.”

  “This is fine. Suits my budget.” Janice easily pulled out the clumsy wooden chair Temple had been forced to wrestle into submission on her side of the table.

  Randy Newman’s satirical song had been wrong about short people: they deserved to live. But he hadn’t underestimated the uphill climb they faced in everyday life. Like a lot of other people who didn’t fit the desirable Madison Avenue image of tall, blond, young, white, thin, and therefore “perfect.”

  “I’m really sorry,” Janice said, “that you had to be right there for that grisly discovery. I was back in Accessories and only heard about it later.” She made an unhappy face. “I’m also really, really sorry about Simon’s death. He was a gifted designer and a sweet guy on top of it. Too sweet, maybe.”

  “You referring to his sexual preference?”

  “No! To his personality. Matt said you had a theatrical background. You and I know the arts are a haven for sensitive people who might be discriminated against elsewhere. Simon was simply one of the good people: good at what he did and good to know.”

  “Simply Simon. So you don’t think he was killed because of his sexual orientation?”

  “I suppose it’s possible. It’s an ugly world. But . . . Maylords is very gay friendly, which is only realistic in the design subculture. Still—”

  Janice frowned as she moved her chicken Caesar salad front and center. “Something is rotten there, something in the management. And then there are those Iranian secret-police types the company hires to do security. But all this is just gossip.”

  “ ‘Just gossip’ is what solves crimes.”

  “Matt said you had a tendency to Nancy-Drew it through life.”

  “Did he? Danny Dove happens to be a very good friend of mine. Danny saved my hide once, and maybe my life. Simon was the most important person in his life, and I am not going to let Simon’s killing be written off to a fluke. I want to know all about Maylords.”

  “My sympathies to your friend Danny, but I can’t say I’m surprised something violent happened. Except that it happened to Simon. The whole place is a snake pit, but why, I can’t tell you. Maybe it’s the celebrity thing.”

  “Wong is pretty hot stuff media-empire wise.”

  “Not Amelia Wong. Danny Dove. There’s a lot of . . . I won’t call it romantic rivalry among the Maylords staff. Maybe a corporate form of bondage and discipline. Look. There are a lot of gays on staff, and certain ugly hierarchies have been set up. It’s not a particularly gay thing. It could be a woman thing. Or a purple people-eater thing. It’s any place where power is used to put sexual pressure on anyone. There could have been jealousy because Simon was connected to such a high-profile person.”

  “Oh, God, I hope that never occurs to Danny. It’d kill him to think he’s responsible, even indirectly. It’s gotta be something else. Amelia Wong gets constant death threats. It could be jealousy, as you suggest, but of her financial success and fame. She’s the new personality that’s been injected into the scene for one high-intensity week.”

  Janet nodded. “Is that why you’re determined to solve all this? It’s part of your job nursemaiding Wong for Maylords?”

  “Exactly. I studied the company when they took me on as Las Vegas PR rep, but I also boned up on Amelia Wong and her kingdom of companies. Anyone can find that out on the Web. Now I want the inside dish on Maylords’s daily operations, on who, what, when, where, and why. Then I might discover the who, what, and why Simon was killed.”

  “I doubt I can help you any more.”

  “You’re the insider.”

  Janice sighed as her fork explored her salad ingredients. “Matt said you were loyal, to a fault.”

  “I don’t care what Matt said to you about me. I want to know what you’ve seen and heard at Maylords.”

  “Why are you so concerned with Maylords?”

  “Because it’s where a man died. That has to mean something.”

  “It could have been a love triangle.”

  “Uh-uh. There was no third leg to what Danny and Simon had. I saw that.”

  “That’s your opinion. Maybe you aren’t the most accurate observer on the block.”

  Ouch! Temple checked the tines of Janice’s fork to make sure her blood wasn’t on them.

  Janice laughed and dug into her salad. “Relax. You’re right. Something is definitely rotten at Maylords, and the casual PR rep is not in the position to document all the ins and outs of it.”

  “But you are.”

  Janice grinned at her. “You bet. I was wondering what I’d gotten myself into well before someone sprayed the model rooms with bullets or poor Simon came tumbling down out of that prize vehicle.”

  “You did? Really?” Temple’s appetite was back as she tackled her hamburger hot dish. Funny how fluttery her stomach had been until Janice had started talking frankly. “Tell me.”

  Now that they were into real “dish,” any personal tensions were forgotten. Or forgiven.

  Janice chewed, probably a perfect ten times, then said, “You do know that the new staff has had a fully paid six-week orientation period before the opening?”

  “Apparently that’s unheard-of in the retail biz. That fact was bally-hooed in my press releases. Kenny was really proud of that.”

  “Well, why then, just as that six-week freebie was ending—and just after Kenny Maylord flew in to meet the new troops—did we all get told we we
re dead meat?”

  “I heard that, but it doesn’t make sense.”

  Janice finished the half of her salad she was going to eat, then leaned back to study their neighboring diners.

  Finally she leaned toward Temple again, lowering her voice.

  “From the beginning it was . . . interesting. First, there were the Disappeared.”

  “The Disappeared?”

  “You know, like in Latin dictatorships, the Desaparecidos. The first one I could understand.”

  “How so?”

  “Two weeks into orientation, she—and, boy, was she a ‘she,’—spent a whole meeting with a case of creeping hemline.”

  Temple shook her head to show that she didn’t get it while also polishing off the last bit of noodle.

  “She kept lounging lower on her tailbone on the folding chair and her skirt kept creeping up her thighs. I’ve never seen anything like it, but I’ve missed a lot of R-rated movies. Pretty soon that skirt was hipbone high.”

  “She was an exhibitionist?”

  “Sad, but apparently so. Anyway, none of us ever saw her again after that meeting.”

  “Understandable.”

  “Then, just before the ‘soft’ opening, which was a few days before the official opening, our leader had flown in from Palm Beach to address the troops.”

  “Kenny.”

  “Right. And he spent half an hour telling us that we were the finest group of well-trained and qualified customer associates Maylords had ever assembled.”

  “Were you?”

  “I think so, truly. Three-quarters of the sales force was hired away from the biggest established furnishing retailers in town by the upscale Maylords image. The interior designers deserted their stand-alone shops like lemmings, and they came from every high-end firm in Clark County. I was in Frames and Accessories, and they even had a plummy Brit, Nigel Potter, who had done table settings for the queen of England, working in Fine China and Crystal.”

  “Do I know that! Nigel and his veddy, veddy British accent and monocle was a huge hit on local TV shows for a week before the opening. Rule, Britannia. The harried PR person can do no better on American TV than with a snobby Brit. It was almost as good as Princess Diana’s butler. Not to mention the queen’s ransom in expensive table settings he whipped together. He almost upstaged Amelia Wong.”

  “So there we were. The CEO said we were the best yet, and we were still basking in the praise when Mark Ainsworth took the stage.”

  Temple giggled into her lemonade.

  “What?”

  “It’s hard to imagine anyone as ineffectual as Mark Ainsworth taking anything, much less a stage.”

  “So your opinion of him matches mine?”

  “Which is?”

  “How did this guy ever get to be manager of a Maylords store? He doesn’t even look the part, being squat and chubby and red faced and oily haired and pathetic. But then he got up to address us after Kenny Maylord had left.”

  “And he showed hidden virtues?”

  “He stunned us. He said two-thirds of us would be gone in three months’ time. That’s before we got vested in a company health plan and got an employee discount, by the way. He said it was sink . . . or swim with the bottom feeders. If we didn’t perform, we’d be out. We were left reeling.”

  Temple considered. “Six weeks’ paid training time before the store even opens, and almost all of you are presumed to be gone in three months? What was the point? A rehearsal for a reality show like Fear Factor?. It makes no sense. And you say Kenny Maylord had left by then?”

  “It was just us and the weaselly widdle wabbit . . . with Dracula fangs.”

  Temple laughed at her description of Ainsworth.

  Janice shrugged disarmingly. “Guilty. Two kids at home who watch way too many cartoons. But I admit I’m perplexed by the Maylords strategy. Why hire the cream of local employees, pay them fully for six weeks merely to learn the company routine, bring in the boss man to praise them to the skies, then turn them over to the on-site manager, who threatens immediate beheadings?”

  Temple mused, this time eating her Jell-O. “Good cop, bad cop,” she said finally.

  “But we were already pumped on ‘how great thou art, Maylords.’ We didn’t need threatening.”

  “You got me. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “No. Anyway, after that there were more ‘Disappeared.’ ”

  “How do you mean? More gratuitous skirt hikings?”

  “No. Just the man in Mattresses who was hired after orientation, came around one day introducing himself . . . and was never seen again.”

  “You suspect foul play?”

  “I suspect he quit, fast, for some reason. He never even got the Jekyll-and-Hyde treatment. He just vamoosed like a bad dream.”

  “Maybe Maylords was the bad dream. Anything else odd going on there?’

  “Only the occasional impossible employee who can do no wrong. But that happens everywhere.”

  “Who is it in this instance?”

  “An impossibly bossy . . . okay, bitchy . . . woman named Beth Blanchard. You glimpsed her in action. She behaves like she runs the joint, orders all her peers around. Worse, she steals other sales people’s commissions in the most blatant way. You have a client coming in at ten? She meets her at the door and ‘escorts’ her to you.”

  “I’ve seen her in action, but how is that stealing?”

  “Only in that any sales agent who ‘refers’ a client to another sales agent gets half the commission. By intercepting your appointments, she gets half the sales commission.”

  “What a witch! Has she done that to you?”

  “She’s tried. She especially went after Nigel’s flocks, who came flooding in asking for him after all the media exposure you got him. He was murderously mad! When she tried a few of those tricks on my modest contacts, from my mall sketch-artist days, I immediately sent a memo to Ainsworth protesting her poaching other people’s clients, but I haven’t heard anything back.”

  “For someone’s who’s dead meat in three months, you’ve got guts.”

  Instead of accepting Temple’s praise, Janice made a face. “I can’t afford to kiss off a good position, not with child support as erratic as it is. But I also can’t afford to give up half my commissions to Miss Snake in the Grass. I’m damned if I do, and damned if I don’t. I think that’s how most of the Maylords employees feel now that the kid gloves are off. It’s as if Kenny Maylord hasn’t got a clue and he’s letting the gorillas in boxing gloves run the zoo.”

  “That sounds awfully cutthroat, like Enron or something. Who would think selling furniture was a new Ottoman Empire, full of Byzantine schemes and backstabbing and two-faced sales associates and managers? And I thought the theater was bad.”

  “It’s retail. And I hear, now that I’m there and talking to the veterans, that retail is hell. It’s all commission, ergo worth backstabbing for.”

  “I would have made the same mistaken assumptions as you did,” Temple said, consolingly.

  Janice quirked her a smile. “I’ll live. At least I hope so. After Simon . . . ”

  “You think he somehow got caught in the schizophrenic management style?”

  “He was very straightforward. Certainly not crooked enough to protect his back. I don’t see Simon playing anyone’s game. You said his partner was Danny Dove, a major celebrity and power in Las Vegas. Maybe Simon never had to fend for himself. And—” Janice winced. “There was the sexual harassment.”

  “I noticed that women were in the minority opening night. There was you and that Blanchard witch, and about half the interior designers.”

  “Not that kind of sexual harassment.”

  “What other kind is there?”

  Janice rolled her eyes at the ugly cafeteria ceiling. “I don’t like to say it, but there’s a double standard going on. One of the Disappeareds was this really handsome guy in Carpets. I mean, Hollywood material even if he couldn’t walk or talk, and he
could.”

  Temple started to interrupt, but Janice cut her off. “Beyond Matt. Beyond Simon. Just beyond. One of those people you can’t take your eyes off even if they’re not your type or your sexual preference. Nature’s amazingly right-on anomaly. Clete was getting hit on, not by the opposite sex. And he was straight. So he left. Before he got anything: health coverage, furniture discount, even a single commission. It sobers you to see a guy get sexually harassed out of a job. You’re so used to seeing it happen to women. I won’t be there long. The best and brightest are being systematically driven out. I don’t have that high an opinion of myself, but I don’t want to end up falling out of a car like a mob hit.”

  “Then you’re not here just because Matt asked you to come?”

  Janice shook her head. “True, I’ve heard a lot about you. From Matt. A good part of it was what a great investigator you are. I think you’re onto something here, Temple. I don’t want Simon dying in vain. The police? It’s all rumors and company politics, with some sexual politics thrown in. Damned if I can figure it out. Maybe you can. One thing’s certain. I’ll discourage Matt from visiting me at work as long as Simon’s murder goes unsolved.”

  “You don’t think the resemblance—?”

  “I don’t know what to think. I’m not used to this industry, I’m used to the open ego warfare of the arts world. I can’t figure the damn place out, except that it doesn’t seem healthy for women, gays, sales associates, interior designers, and other living things. And that’s all it is, whatever it’s feeding upon, whoever or whyever.”

  Temple nodded. She’d already resolved not to rest until Danny had an answer, however ugly. Now she had to go forward and would have to wait until she’d accomplished something to ask Janice what the heck else Matt had said about Temple that Janice was unwilling to pass on.

  Other than that she was a good investigator.

  Try to take that to bed or to the bank with you!