Cat in an Orange Twist

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “So whose was the second body?”

  Max knew how to pull her out of an emotional tailspin. Engage her puzzle-solving mind.

  “I found her. Personally. Alone. Swinging from picture-hanging wire in Simon’s brilliant Art Deco interior vignette, with a letter opener stuck in her chest.”

  “Temple! That’s ghastly.”

  “Not as bad as finding Simon. He had been stabbed too, and then put in the Murano. But he was just plain nice. Beth Blanchard was a witch. Bitch. There. I said it, even if it speaks badly of the dead. I saw her in action and she was incredible. Every cliché you ever heard about a bitch on wheels. Still, it was awful to see her dead.”

  Max nodded. “I know what you mean. Much as Kathleen O’Connor wronged me and mine for twenty years, and as much as I would have cheerfully and personally have wrung her neck, I’m glad Devine had to ID the body, not me.”

  “You mean that?”

  “Which? The neck wringing or ID-ing the body?”

  “Both, I guess.”

  “Yes.”

  “So you don’t hate Matt.”

  Max pushed her always unruly hair behind one ear. “Wish I could.”

  “But you don’t.”

  “Don’t tell anyone.”

  “Only you.”

  He caught her in a bone-crushing embrace then, and she watered his velour again, not sure if it was for Simon or Danny, or Matt, or Max, or herself.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. Not once, but twice or more.

  He never did say why, and she didn’t think to wonder about that until much later.

  They pulled apart and ate the sandwiches, not with relish but with a mutual pretense of appetite.

  They drank the wine.

  Max asked her all the right questions, and soon he was painlessly caught up on all the painful things that had happened to her. She didn’t mention collaborating with Rafi Nadir. That was even worse than mentioning Matt.

  Max just shook his head at Danny’s loss, frowned at her description of the Maylords house politics, and laughed at the extra-virgin oil incident. Not even Max could take a gay biker gang that seriously. Maybe that was a mistake.

  As comforting as it was to be consulting with Max again, he never offered to see her back to the Circle Ritz.

  He held her in the entryway, and kissed her six ways from Sunday.

  But he never asked her to stay.

  Temple left in a slight wine glow that was rapidly waning as the hearty sandwich absorbed it. Talk about an anticlimax! She’d writhed with guilt over smooching Matt in the hall, tossed and turned herself out of the bed in the middle of the night. Rushed over to Max’s place to confirm their scintillating couplehood, only to find Max acting like he was the ex-priest, not Matt!

  Oh, he had sympathized, encouraged, theorized, but he had never volunteered to barge back into her life, protect her honor, and solve the crimes.

  He had pled the exhaustion of the book, of his recent workout. He had not taken advantage of the visit to make love to her.

  He had never, for a moment, acted like the old Max. At all.

  She had left the house wined and dined, and somewhat petted, but suspiciously unfulfilled.

  This was a first. And not a good one.

  But maybe she had learned what she had come here to find out, after all.

  Dry Red Wine

  Max leaned his weight against the shut front door, both ensuring its security and regretting the fact that it was shut more than anything in his life since Ireland.

  “Lad?”

  The voice behind him was tentative, almost cajoling.

  He sighed and turned to face Gandolph.

  The old man’s smooth fleshy face was riddled with wrinkles of anxiety.

  “I apologize, Max. I’d no right to bring my sorry dead skin back into your life, to interfere with . . . the young and the living.”

  “Save it, Garry.” Max pushed himself off the closed door, off the recent, regrettable past. “That sounds like the title of a TV soap opera: The Young and the Living. What does that make us? The Old and the Dead?”

  “In my case, yes.”

  “Well, you’re not dead yet.”

  Gandolph chuckled. “Your position on my age is noted. Seriously, Max, she’s a lovely, lovely girl, inside and out. She’d have to be to win you from your self-imposed emotional exile. I would have found a discreet way to exit the house, believe me. There was no need to turn the lady out. Our cause may be noble, but it doesn’t require martyrdom of such a personal nature.”

  “It’s not only your being here, and the need to keep your survival secret from the Synth. All that damn, difficult physical catching up on my acrobatic and magical skills. I don’t think I could do her justice tonight, and if Temple deserves anything of me, it’s justice.”

  “Nonsense. You young men are so self-exacting. Women rarely demand as much as we believe they ought to. And you love her. That’s why you’re too proud to let her see any hint of weakness on your part. Pride, not weakness. And yet, pride is weakness.”

  “Oh, shut up, Garry. You’re a great magician, but a lousy Ann Landers.”

  “I believe she also is dead.”

  “Does it matter? Her work, her column, goes on. And so does yours.”

  “I hate having to stay undercover, letting you take all the risks.”

  “If I bust the Synth, neither of us will have to worry about staying undercover again. Ever.”

  “You’re now that convinced that they’re the key to the past, and our future?”

  Max nodded. “Want a sandwich? There are plenty of fixings in the kitchen.”

  “Sandwich?” Garry sniffed. Derisively. “Your young lady is a sweet little thing, but she has no culinary skills whatsoever.”

  Max laughed. “You know what? Frankly, my dear Gandolph, I don’t give a damn.”

  They retreated to the kitchen anyway, where Max chatted with his mentor while Garry whipped up an exotic hot dish that soothed his own soul and that Max had no appetite to taste.

  Instead, Max drank way too much of costly dry, red wine.

  House of Dearth

  Temple was emotionally exhausted the next day. (She certainly wasn’t physically exhausted. Wonder why not?)

  First she had to buzz by Maylords. Damage control. Not even the best PR ace could put a good face on a double homicide on the same scene.

  The place looked deserted, and any staff she ran into wouldn’t meet her eyes. It wasn’t her. It was the miasma of suspicion and anxiety haloing Maylords like a New Age aura.

  She met with Kenny Maylord and Mark Ainsworth. One had no clue, the other was arrogantly indifferent.

  “We need to concentrate on the Wong factor,” she told them. “Amelia is a symbol of interior peace, of spacial harmony. We need to emphasize her shtick. Maybe another blessing ceremony. I don’t know! We’ve got to get beyond reality.”

  “Amen,” Ainsworth sneered. “I guess all PR people can offer is pie in the sky.”

  “It’s better than Murder in the Model Rooms, which is what you’ve got now.”

  “We’ve,” Kenny Maylord said, looking both pouty and threatening. “We’ve”

  “I guess,” Temple said, “in the design field you figure out early that you can’t make a silk purse out of a boar’s ear.”

  “That’s wrong,” Kenny said, vaguely, because he hadn’t quite tumbled to how or why.

  “I don’t do sows,” Temple said, and left the meeting.

  She knew, though, she had a tough obligation she couldn’t dodge: paying a call on Danny Dove. She hadn’t confronted feeling like a third wheel on a gay community bicycle built for two, and Danny deserved better of her.

  He would not be back at work yet, but Temple knew where he lived. The paper had done a big feature spread on the place only months ago.

  How sad to realize now the obvious reason for the article about the usually superprivate Danny Dove. His newly redecorated house. Decor by that dazzli
ng young talent, Simon Foster. Temple hadn’t known about Simon’s place in Danny’s personal life when she read how he had transformed Danny’s vintage house into a contemporary showplace. Now she understood why the sudden publicity peek into Danny’s lifestyle.

  The article wasn’t about Danny and his wealth and success but the little-known Simon, and his talent and designing future. Danny had opened the doors to his life only to get Simon’s interior designs some local recognition, and clients.

  The Las Vegas opening of an upscale design/furnishing operation like Maylords must have seemed like manna from heaven for Simon’s future.

  Temple shook her head as she guided the Miata down the winding streets of the city’s most established area where huge, two-story houses dated to past decades. These old places were the estates that time had forgot.

  Nowadays, Las Vegas personalities who liked privacy would buy them quietly and redo them. And Simon would have had a whole neighborhood to reinvent.

  Temple loved vintage architecture—Mediterranean, provincial French, Italian villa. She had cruised by this area more than once just to glimpse the stately terra-cotta tile and slate roofs.

  So she knew right where Danny’s place was. Because it was her favorite. Or at least the roofline was: ’40s moderne, all angles and no visible roof at all, just pure geometry in blazing white stucco with black marble trim.

  She didn’t know if Danny would welcome visitors yet, even her.

  Most of these homes hid behind high solid walls. Danny’s was a ten-foot-high wash of stucco reminiscent of Siegfried and Roy’s poured-concrete compound, a Taj Mahal built to house themselves and their regal white tigers and lions, and now a memorial to an outstanding career cut short.

  Temple sat in the idling Miata before a wide black wrought-iron gate, looking for the security box.

  It was, of course, too highly placed for her to use without getting out of the car that was as short as she was, automotively speaking.

  Even standing nose-to-nose with the stucco pillar she had to stretch to push the button.

  The box remained silent. She waited a decent interval, then pushed again.

  A voice answered, either hoarse or distorted by static.

  “Yes?”

  “Temple Barr to see Danny Dove,” she told the sun-bleached, painted steel box that acted as major domo.

  Temple always felt like an imposter using one of these screening devices. As if she were a demented fan desperately seeking an idol, or some flunky delivering garlic. As if even someone who knew her wouldn’t possibly admit her to an inner sanctum.

  The gates clanged as an electronic link ordered them open.

  It seemed a long time before they swung wide enough to admit even an automotive midge like the Miata.

  Temple jumped back into the sun-warmed leather seat and nudged the gas pedal down as soon as the portal was wide enough.

  The house beyond was a two-story fantasy domain. Assorted white stucco wings studded with rows of glass blocks turned it into an albino Mondrian painting. Since Mondrian paintings were usually colorful, it was like viewing a ghost . . . a ghost painting, a ghost house.

  The greenery along the driveway and around the house was clipped like an Irish poodle into topiary shapes set off by the house’s sun-washed walls.

  Despite the place’s post-Art Deco geometry, it also felt very Mediterranean. And the rectilinear lines couldn’t help but remind Temple of white-marble graveyard monuments and mausoleums.

  The Miata stopped before the low steps leading to the entry. Ever the photo stylist, Temple knew the car’s shiny red silhouette would gleam like a ripe tomato against the greenery and white stucco, creating an Italian flag color scheme.

  She also knew that the inside of the big white house held nothing lively now, only the depressing aura of recent loss and death.

  Glass blocks bracketed the sleek double doors. She sensed watery movement behind them before she could knock or ring.

  Then, one door opened.

  She didn’t know what she expected. Not Danny himself, wearing a black silk turtleneck with the long sleeves pushed up to his elbows, and black denim designer jeans.

  “Come in.” He pulled her inside with one hand. One cold hand.

  The foyer was two stories high, all white and silver and black, with filtered sunlight pouring through glass blocks along a stairway that curved up one wall, a sinuous brushed steel railing snaking alongside it like a platinum anaconda.

  The floor was black-and-white marble and the effect was spectacular.

  She didn’t dare say so to the ghost of Danny Dove who had greeted her, his Harpo Marx blond hair looking as dry and gray as a steel-wool pad against his ashen skin tones.

  Still, his hand squeezed hers. Hard.

  “You are a ray of red in a monochromatic life,” he said. “Thanks for coming to the interment. I didn’t have a chance to say so before.”

  Temple had been an awkward mourner at a mostly gay community ritual. The others had seemed inured to early death, thanks to the AIDS epidemic. She had been there, paid her respects, and left quickly.

  “All that golf-course-tended sod must have been hell on your Via Spiga heels,” Danny added.

  Temple almost gasped. “You noticed?”

  “You were the only one there in heels smaller than a size ten. You were no ‘darling Clement-turned-Clementine in big old bootsies number nine!’ Don’t think I didn’t appreciate it. Cross-dressing may be amusing, but it is damn out of scale. You are a perfect size five, right?”

  Temple just nodded. She hadn’t expect Danny’s trademark acerbic wit . . . not yet.

  “Everyone is avoiding me like the plague.” He led her into a vast two-story living room. “You’d think I was HIV positive instead of suffering only from the fact that life is a bitch, and sudden death is infinitely worse and there ain’t no overtime for the survivors, no matter how much we might wish it.”

  While Temple perched on the spindly-legged moderne sofa he led her to, Danny turned his attention on a steel-and-glass bar cart ac-coutered with authentic ’20s cocktail glasses and a chrome soda siphon.

  “Want a drink? Please say yes. I will not allow myself to drink alone. I have been damnably sober for the three worst days of my life and I am dying for a martini. I promise to sip it.”

  “A martini it is.” Temple set her tote bag on the floor beside her. “Danny, the house is spectacular.”

  “So glad you noticed. I suppose if a man must have a memorial, better it be a house than some graveyard sentimentality nobody ever sees. This is Simon’s true headstone. This house and everything in it.”

  “Including you,” she pointed out.

  Danny came over with two low, footed glasses. “For now. I know that he wouldn’t wish me to languish here. He was an amazingly generous soul. Ah. Bombay Sapphire with just a whisper of vermouth. Now. What business are you here upon, Little Red? And what have you in your basket as you trundle through the woods? I believe that you were hunting wolves, the last I heard.”

  Danny sat on an Eames chair—an original ’30s black leather Eames chair with matching ottoman. He regarded Temple with the inquisitive look of a sparrow begging bread crumbs.

  That’s when she understood the role in which fate and Danny had cast her now: part detective, part avenger, and part therapist.

  “That Maylords opening was a . . . an opportunity and a hope for so many,” she said. “Simon. My friend Matt’s friend Janice.”

  “Friend?” Danny called her on it. “Isn’t that a weasel word? Remember, I met your ‘friend’ Matt some while back. Unfortunately straight, but otherwise delectable. I can’t believe that you haven’t noticed yourself.” Danny sighed. “He was, of course, the same physical type as Simon. Could he have been the intended victim?”

  “I looked into that. It’s possible, but Simon’s murderer may have been a woman named Beth Blanchard, and Matt only met her at the opening night, and barely then. She did mistake Matt for an
employee, though.”

  Danny’s blue eyes focused into lasers. “Beth Blanchard.” The name dripped with disdain. “Who was she?”

  “The past tense is right. Beth Blanchard was just found dead at Maylords herself. Stabbed as well—and, as an additional decorative touch—hung by picture wire in Simon’s Art Deco vignette. From the chrome bedpost. I found her.”

  Danny took in all that information while sipping rapidly from his petite martini glass.

  “Did Simon ever mention her?” Temple asked.

  “A woman? Hardly.”

  “But this one was mean. She loved to ride rough-shod over everybody at Maylords, and apparently management let her.”

  “The classic management distraction tactic.”

  “They wanted the other employees to hate Beth Blanchard.”

  “And thus to ignore their own hateful ways.”

  “Simon told you this?”

  “No. Simon told me nothing of his problems at Maylords.” Danny sounded self-accusatory.

  “Then how did you know?”

  “Munchkin mine! I’ve been around the block and, what’s more germane, around major production companies for aeons. Creative temperament is my middle name, and group politics is my master’s degree. It’s the oldest management trick in the book: create an untouchable monster for all the troops to hate. Presto! It’s a diversion while management pulls a lot of nasty strings and no one notices. If Maylords was tolerating a Gorgon, something must have been wrong there.”

  He shook his head.

  Like Temple, he had been cursed with curls, and seldom was taken seriously because of that. Curls were youthful and frivolous. Or at least had that frustrating reputation.

  “Simon was not one to whine,” Danny said. “He tried to give every situation its most generous interpretation. I suppose you would call him an optimist.”

  “I would call him a person of substance in a shallow world.”

  “Exactly. I had noticed signs, but I put them down to opening night nerves. God knows I’ve had bouts of that all my life. I should have read between the lines, Temple. I should have seen that all was not calm, all was not bright in Simon’s new position.”