Cat in an Orange Twist

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Temple followed directions, digesting the oddity of a Fontana brothers funeral.

  Another coffered door awaited, this one covered in gold leaf.

  Inside the carpet was the emerald green of Irish grass, and the walls were covered in malachite mirror tiles.

  Temple signed herself in at the gilt-edged book, and wrote a sentiment on the small card and envelope provided. She turned to face the room. Er, chamber.

  Brocaded Louis XVI furniture groups dotted the dark green rug like oases of tapestry. The room was sparsely populated so far, but some people gathered at the fringes. The open casket of solid copper at the room’s far end blared like the final trumpet on Judgment Day.

  Temple looked for the living first. Danny was . . . over there, next to Amelia Wong, of all people.

  The Wong entourage clustered in one furniture oasis, mostly standing and looking uncomfortable. Especially the muscle in polyester suits and, even here, sunglasses.

  Temple headed for Danny.

  As she neared, she saw he looked utterly pale and dessicated, as if all the life had been kiln-dried out of him. Even his curly hair looked brittle, like wood shavings on the head of a puppet who longed to be a real boy.

  “Munchkin,” he said in a tragic voice when he saw her.

  His fingers curled around and crushed hers. “Thank you for coming.”

  She couldn’t muster anything to say, and he added, “Not only here, but before, with the awful news.”

  Now she couldn’t say anything inadequate she had drummed up—“So tragic, so senseless, so sorry.”

  He bowed his forehead toward hers, and they said nothing.

  Someone else was edging near Danny; Temple found herself off to the side, facing Amelia Wong.

  “What a waste,” Ms. Wong said. “He was young, but yet a very old soul. I sensed it.”

  “It’s . . . kind that you came.”

  “I was called. I offered my services for the ceremonials, that all should be harmonious. Mr. Dove is a great artist of his day, and Simon would have been recognized in his own right in time. I had agreed to tutor him in my methods.”

  “Tutor Simon?”

  “I am setting up a network of . . . emissaries.”

  “A franchise.”

  Wong’s black eyes glittered with annoyance. “If one would be so crass.”

  Pardon her! Temple didn’t usually let crass commercial words pass her lips at a funeral parlor. She was, however, intrigued to know that Wong had been mentoring Simon. Another reason for some competitive Maylords drudge to hate him.

  Temple braced herself to approach the coffin. Who liked funerals? Never having lost anyone close to her, other than elderly relatives presumably relieved to escape their last illnesses, she never knew whether she preferred to see the dead person glorified by the undertaker’s art into a Glamour Photo effigy or just represented by a discreet photograph.

  Each method was cold, intolerably cold, in its own way.

  Two kneelers, empty, were paired before a handsome casket surrounded by its sophisticated floral arrangements. The hard part was edging close enough to look into the coffin.

  Oh, my. Simon, beautiful in life, gorgeous in death.

  She felt a presence beside her. Danny.

  “ ‘Mine eyes dazzle; he died young,’ ” she murmured through the tears. She evoked one of the most striking lines in three thousand years of dramatic literature. Danny, showman that he always was, recognized the paraphrase immediately.

  The line was from The Duchess of Malfi, John Webster’s dark seventeenth-century drama. Those six words had lived as a paean of utter grief into the twenty-first century, a tribute to premature death, to murderous death, to the death of the beloved.

  Danny’s hand stole into hers. “He would have adored your eulogy. I’m sorry you had just met him.”

  “No, I hadn’t.”

  Danny’s red-rimmed eyes met hers with surprise.

  “I knew you, so I had always known Simon.”

  He squeezed her hand, ebbed away in a haze of her own eyes’ making.

  And through that haze, she made the same mistake that so many people at Maylords had: she saw Matt lying there like the noble young knight slain by monsters.

  She turned away, as if she saw a ghost.

  The ghost of her own emotions, and the ghost of her own ever-analyzing brain.

  The pattern blurred and came into too-brief focus again. The reason for murder just eluded her, but it was there, thumping like a heartbeat under her skin.

  If only she could cut loose from her own fears and expectations, she might make some headway.

  The only way to guarantee that was to push her nosy way forward, searching for answers.

  Finding the murderer wouldn’t help Simon, but it might console Danny and it sure as heck would overcome her own unreasonable, itchy fears for Matt’s safety, now and forever and ever. Amen.

  Pillow Talk

  Once my Miss Temple is safely en route to her date with death, I head back to Maylords and my new undercover role as a stuffed toy. So I am once again lying there, hoping for enlightenment, but observing pretty much nothing, when I hear a shrill, lamentably human voice. It again appears to be directed at yours truly.

  “Oh, my goodness! Look at that. Look at that, will you?”

  Well, I would, except that I am playing Statue.

  “That is fabulous! That is so amazing. That is the best, absolutely best, soft-sculpture cat that I have ever seen. Do not you think so, Irma?”

  Not again. Is there no end to my charisma? Yes, Irma, you do think so. You are not alone. But I am a rock, get it? I am an island. Get off my naval chart! You will blow my cover!

  “Where is a salesman? I must have a salesman. Look at this.”

  Probing nails finger my ruff. My well-groomed, handsome ruff, I might add.

  “Where is the tag? There is no tag.”

  “Maybe,” Irma suggests in an uncertain voice, “it is on the rear.” No! Not again! Nothing is on the rear but the . . . er, rear.

  “I cannot believe they would not tag such a perfect specimen.”

  That is exactly what I felt during my serial unhappy interactions with the so-called animal shelter in this town, a.k.a. the city pound. The name must have something to do with the disposability of a pound of flesh, and fur.

  “I must have it.”

  You are not the first female to feel that way, lady.

  “Where is the salesman?”

  “Uh, Patsy. This lady here seems to want to help you.”

  “Can you sell me this fabulous fake cat?”

  “I cannot ‘sell’ you anything, madam. Maylords does not sell. Selling is vulgar. We ‘place’ exquisite objects with appreciative ac-quisitors.”

  “Huh?”

  I am with Irma. Huh indeed.

  “There is no tag on this animal,” she says, quite accurately.

  “Even I haven’t seen it out before. Probably some . . . inventive person slipped it into place without the proper paperwork.”

  “Can you fix it?’

  “Of course. I will simply look this item up in the computer.”

  This item!?

  “Thank you, Miss—?”

  “Blanchard. Beth Blanchard.”

  “Well, I must have it. Look at the quality of the faux fur. The expression! So utterly feline. So utterly . . . out of it. I cannot imagine why Maylords would not tag such an exquisite item.”

  Exquisite item. Okay, that is more like it.

  “You have to understand the Maylords way,” Beth Blanchard says. “Everything we have is exquisite. We have no need to ‘push’ product at a gullible public. We seek a clientele, like yourself, who has the taste to discover the superb palette of perfection we offer.”

  Wow. A superb palette of perfection. In midnight black. That is me. Especially when I am playing dead. Superbly.

  “If you ladies will wait in the café I’ll look up this item’s SKU number and have the full
particulars to you in a few minutes.”

  They duly depart, leaving Miss Beth Blanchard staring at me. I have to keep my eyes open and motionless, of course, like taxidermy eyes.

  “A cat-shaped pillow!” she mutters. “What bozo bought this tacky piece of junk?”

  I brace for a fist pounding into me, which is what people like her do to furniture accessories they do not like. Luckily, Miss Beth Blanchard takes out her frustrations elsewhere. She enters the Art Deco vignette and moves Mr. Simon’s Erté prints back the way they were before she rearranged them this morning.

  Talk about obsessive-compulsive! She reminds me of a rat on a wheel running first one way, then the other. As if it much makes a difference in the daily rat race that is Maylords. I know one thing: here the rats are winning.

  Hunting Grounds

  for Murder

  Temple found herself feeling the opposite of what she had expected after Simon’s wake: eager to race back to Maylords and the arts council reception . . . and Beth Blanchard.

  A knife in the back.

  Other than the fact that this seemed general operating procedure at Maylords—oh, let her count the ways—she was thinking that this was a maddened woman’s method. This was up close and personal.

  And Beth Blanchard was another one of those towering examples of womanhood nowadays, like Lieutenant Molina. She’d have the height, and the strength, to strike down hard at a man’s back.

  Even to manhandle his dead body into a vehicle. Or . . . maybe she had help. Jerome Johnson had been suspiciously servile when taking her orders around the showroom. Maybe he had to be. Or maybe Jerome had done it. Why? Well, he certainly was oversensitive about Temple’s nonrelationship with Matt Devine. And Matt had indicated Jerome had uncomfortable ideas (from Matt’s literally straitlaced view) about himself.

  Maybe Jerome had mistaken Simon for Matt from the back and . . . whammo.

  Because there was Matt, associated not with one but two of the few women who worked for Maylords: Janice and Temple herself.

  Hadn’t they all had terrifying recent evidence of how lethal a crush gone wrong could be?

  But mostly Temple liked Beth Blanchard for Simon’s murder. She was a Bad Attitude walking. Temple could easily see that temper getting the better of her.

  Still, that didn’t explain the frightening shooting attack the night of the opening. Was it coincidence? A Wong-motivated international terrorist attack on the one hand, maybe involving hmmm, foreign trade, the Chinese tongs. If so, where did the over-the-top bikers harassing her come from? A local revue? The Good Ship Lollipop? Everything was so disparate. Guns and gays, media icons like Amelia and Danny, feuding low-level employees like Jerome and Beth. And in-house sexual harassment by both genders, for Beth had been after Simon.

  But if Beth was the murderer what did she use? What weapon—? Most people don’t tote long sharp knives around with them. Temple’s theory made the stabbing a crime of balked passion. Why else would the murderer have had to resort to hiding the body in a motor vehicle that was the center of attention? Did the killer want the body to be discovered with a flash of media fire? Or just hidden long enough to arrange an alibi? And could Beth have dragged Simon there? Yes, if it hadn’t been too far. And she would have been frantic to hide the evidence of her act.

  If obscuring the time or place of the murder was a goal, the Murano’s heavy window tint made it a pretty clever and safe bet.

  Temple hated the almost opaque black window tints people used now. In a desert climate like Las Vegas’s it was supposed to block out heat. But Temple always liked to check out who was poking along at minus-zero miles per hour, or zigzagging in and out of traffic like a berserk attachment on an Italian sewing machine. Not that she had ever done anything more with sewing than hand stitch pants legs hems up. That was why she preferred skirts that she could always roll up at the waist.

  Temple was in the Maylords parking lot before she knew it, habit allowing her to drive the familiar route without impeding her theorizing.

  She checked her watch before she grabbed her tote bag. Less than two hours before the reception. Amelia Wong was coming from Simon’s viewing too, and had still been there with her whole entourage before Temple left.

  That meant Temple had time to look up Beth and Jerome to ask some subtle leading questions she hadn’t quite thought of yet. . . . She did not relish approaching either one now. BB had been born hostile and certainly showed that side of herself to Temple. And Jerome didn’t seem to like her. Or like the fact that Matt did.

  The store was oddly deserted, a testimony to the recently turgid economy even for a hot new ticket in town like Maylords.

  The only way to find her usual suspects was to cruise the aisles. Beth Blanchard would come running at any sign or sound of a customer to hijack, Temple knew, not disturbed that her steel-heeled Weitzmans were clicking away like an old-fashioned telegraph key on the polished stone.

  She really didn’t see how Simon’s death could have had anything to do with the Amelia Wong hullabaloo. It must have been a coincidence. As for the window-blasting spree, mischievous malice was nothing new for Maylords, which apparently axed employees as early and often as the French Revolution guillotined aristocrats.

  Temple was lost.

  The store was laid out like a maze, meant to surprise and astound, not to be predictable.

  Her heels echoed like bullets hitting glass. She usually liked the sound of her own progress, the sense that she was moving forward briskly.

  Now she began to wonder if “briskly” was such a good idea.

  One man had already died in this upscale Wonderland.

  She had raced in here expecting to nail a killer.

  Maybe a killer would nail her.

  Where were the Fontana brothers when you needed them?

  At Layaway Land, or wherever, watching over Amelia Wong and Company, i.e., her Flying Monkey minions.

  So Danny wasn’t here. Max sure wasn’t here. Matt was not here. And the Wonderful Wizard of Ahs was out to lunch.

  Temple tried to distract herself from her nerves by casting a musical “yellow brick” road show of her own.

  She was Dorothy. Danny was . . . the scarecrow. Max was . . . the Wizard himself. Matt was . . . hmmm, the Tin Woodman, who was looking for a heart or maybe just a libido. The Wicked Witch was Beth Blanchard and the Flying Monkeys were the Maylords security forces.

  And Toto was . . .

  Holy not-cow! Louie!

  What was Midnight Louie doing here, right in front of her just when she was feeling most abandoned, swaggering his tail left to right like a metronome, leading her?. . .

  Leading her through the maze that was Maylords, a physical and a psychological maze.

  Was it really him?

  He stopped, growled, and regarded her with the expression a cat would reserve for a termite.

  Yup. It was Louie his own self.

  Hey! Sometimes a faithful cat is the best a girl can do.

  Temple moved forward, cheered by the company.

  They rounded a corner and she stopped.

  Creepy, where they’d ended up. Right at Simon’s wonderful Art Deco room vignette.

  Temple could have bawled, except she saw an all-too-familiar form standing in front of the paired Erté prints.

  That witch couldn’t let a dead man rest in peace for even three days. She was fooling with Simon’s design yet again!

  Well, who’s afraid of the big, bad witch?

  Not Temple when in full defense-of-friend mode.

  “Can’t even wait for the internment to ruin his room setting, can you?” she challenged.

  At her ankles, Midnight Louie rubbed back and forth, back and forth, as if intent on impressing his presence on her.

  Beth Blanchard turned stiffly, like Freddy on Elm Street or Jason on Halloween.

  Omigosh. The woman was demented. She hardly seemed human the slow, deliberate way she turned to face Temple.

  Majo
r creepy. Over the edge. Temple had been all too right.

  She glanced down at Midnight Louie. He didn’t look like a SWAT team, which is what Temple figured she would need when the chair swung around to reveal the desiccated, dead face of Mrs. Bates Motel”.

  Beth Blanchard swung around. Her frozen expression sneered at Temple. The knife . . . the dagger glinted in the overhead track lighting.

  It was embedded in Beth Blanchard’s sunken chest.

  Yo ho ho.

  Temple reared back. She saw the track lights reflecting on a metallic hangman’s noose that let Beth Blanchard twist slowly in the air-conditioning.

  Picture-hanging wire, Temple thought. Strangled with picture-hanging wire and strung up right in front of the Erté prints she had never been content to leave as Simon had hung them. As she had never been content to leave Simon alone.

  And so someone had seen to it that she had been left alone at last.

  The body spun again in some whimsy of the air conditioning.

  She seemed to slow dance in the perfectly lovely vignette.

  Waltzing with the dagger in her heart.

  Which was . . . the perfect weapon to find in a home furnishings showroom, the perfect weapon to seize and plunge into the passing torso, whether Simon Fosters’s or hers.

  A letter opener.

  A solid pewter letter opener with a spiky Chinese symbol for a handle that was as sharp as the blade itself.

  What we have here is a feng shui felony.

  Double felony, Temple thought.

  Now that she looked closer—and who could take her eyes off an outré scene that seemed to belong on the silver screen?—Beth had been hung from the top rail of the chrome four-poster bed.

  Let the punishment fit the crime: she had rearranged the designs of others, now someone had arranged her into a death scene of his or her own design, for his or her own reasons.

  Although the head was tilted, and the wire had cut into the flesh of her throat, there was little blood and the face was amazingly undistorted. The hanging must have come after.