Cat in a Red Hot Rage Read online

  “This isn’t a play performance,” Temple said. “And it will actually boost your career. You deserve more than radio exposure.”

  “I don’t need it.”

  “But your panting public does.” Temple went on tiptoe to demonstrate what his panting public needed with a quick but thorough kiss.

  Then she backed off.

  She felt like a nervous matchmaker, as she always did at a full-press media event. Now she had to sit back and watch all the ingredients blend into some powerhouse super-salad of hype no one could predict, least of all her.

  Especially unpredictable was Electra’s red-hatted presence in the audience. Temple was uneasy about that, but maybe seeing Elmore make a public ass out of himself would be cathartic, which was a fancy word for feeling self-justified. Temple understood that this was so traumatic for Electra, having her past zooming back at her like a motorcycle out of control.

  Temple had been there recently. . . .

  Matt would be the sane, neutral bridge between two volatile substances: manly men and womanly women. Both had enough years on them to add up to media TNT.

  Temple prepared to bite her nails as Savannah Ashleigh did a Marilyn Monroe wiggle to the podium to start the show. Even her voice was MM breathy.

  “Ladies and gentlemen. I am so proud and happy to introduce your host for this event, the yummy-on-the-tummy and even ears and other areas too—Mr. Midnight! Matt Devine from ‘The Midnight Hour’ on station WCOO, that’s pronounced W-‘cooo,’ and we will when we hear him over the microphone. I must say that he looks as yummy as he sounds, so voice isn’t everything.”

  Temple felt her eyes crossing, but the TV cameras zoomed in on Savannah’s cleavage and then on Matt’s face as he approached the podium.

  Claps and whistles faded.

  Matt leaned toward the microphone, looking boyishly mischievous. “I would like to thank the pulchritudinous Miss Ashleigh for her extremely wholesome delivery of the introduction.”

  The paraphrase of JFK’s response to Marilyn Monroe’s notoriously inciting “Happy Birthday” serenade spawned another round of hoots, applause, and catcalls.

  Temple let out a long-held breath. Matt would do just fine.

  Now, let the games begin!

  “Girls just want to have fun,” Candy Crenshaw was saying into her microphone. “Boys just want to have guns.” The Red Hat Sisterhood’s clown princess was ready to crack wise.

  Only four minutes into the debate, tempers were already boiling over.

  “Just a minute, Ms. Crenshaw,” Matt said. “Let’s get this straight. “You’re saying that grown men can’t indulge their fantasy personas, but that women can?”

  “Women can-can,” Cal Crenshaw shot back, leaning to look around the moderator’s podium to glare at his ex-wife. “I happen to know this woman is sixty-three and a half years old. Why is she got up like a saloon girl from the Old West?”

  A titter stirred the audience, for the feather boas did scream “saloon floozy.”

  “Thank you, gentlemen and ladies,” Crenshaw went on with a tip of his Western hat brim.

  “Why are you got up as Wyatt Earp?” Kit asked quickly.

  “To match you gals,” another BHB panelist said. “Anything you can do we can do better.”

  “Can you get five thousand soul brothers to meet in Las Vegas?” Candy Crenshaw asked. “How many of you disgruntled dudes are there? Fifteen in all?”

  “That’s enough to ruffle your feathers,” Crenshaw bragged.

  Matt intervened. “Let’s have a duel of the membership numbers, ladies and gents. Gentlemen?”

  “Mmmble-mmmble,” Crenshaw muttered into his mike.

  “I didn’t quite hear that,” Matt prodded.

  “Forty-five,” he answered.

  “Must be their waist sizes,” Candy Crenshaw quipped.

  The audience roared.

  “Look who’s talking?” Elmore Lark riposted.

  “Enough,” Matt said, “or we’ll all think you’re comparing IQs.”

  Laughter came from the audience and both sides of the debating table.

  “Look,” Matt said, “can’t you Black Hat guys admit you get a kick from dressing up in an over-the-top ‘uniform’ and parading around in public?”

  “We have points to make,” Mike Crenshaw growled. A little.

  “So do the ladies.” Matt was now firmly in the role of peacemaker.

  Things were getting so cozy that the water pitcher was crossing the dividing line of the podium and snaking its way from the red-and-purple side to the black-and-blue side.

  Temple felt like a diplomat. Both sides were kind of cute, really, the flamboyant middle-aged folks playing dress-up. Even the issues they raised were mostly moot. People their age could hardly care that passionately about the sexual one-upmanship one-upwomanship games anymore, could they?

  She eyed Matt with fond pride. He’d been perfect for this delicate assignment. Maybe, when the clips ran on TV, he’d get some master of ceremonies gigs out of it. Not that she wanted him out of town any more than he was . . .

  Even Electra’s ex, Elmore Lark, appeared to be mellowing. He coughed into a Western kerchief, then stood up to wave at the crowd, doffing his hat and putting hand on heart.

  That was a bit much. He was an unadmitted bigamist, no matter the excuses he made, not some hokey Buffalo Bill Cody impersonator waving at the audience like a star performer. . . .

  Oops. He keeled over onto the table.

  He must have been drinking, had a concealed pint of something in the back pocket of his jeans.

  Oops.

  Temple started running to the front of the room, but by now the whole audience was rising and buzzing. TV videographers were crowding like crows with camcorders around that end of the table.

  Elmore Lark had been taken ill.

  Or . . . killed. Right in front of God and TV cameras and everyone.

  Chapter 29

  Lark to Lark?

  The sirens wailed away down the Strip.

  Elmore Lark lay in the back of an ambulance under the intense care of two emergency technicians.

  Temple was about ready to ride along with them as a patient.

  Her first job after alerting hotel security to call an ambulance was to drag Electra out of the room to the nearest Fontana brother.

  “Home, James,” Temple had said. That smooth, olive-skinned Fontana brow had puckered.

  “I’m Armando, Miss Temple—”

  “She needs to vanish. Fast.”

  “Ah. Just the job for a Viper. Madame?” He bowed and offered his arm to Electra, who promptly forgot all about the clear and present danger to her loathed not-really-ex-husband.

  Temple was left unescorted, and uninspired.

  The Crystal Phoenix continued to be the site of homicide most bona fide. The Red Hat Sisterhood’s “Big Wheel in Las Vegas” convention kept coming up corpses. Temple’s best and biggest client kept showing up on the evening news in less than a positive light, and Max was MIA.

  Matt, however, was standing by his woman. Right now. And he was way more bracing that even a Fontana brother.

  “What a rotten break,” he told Temple, massaging her iron-hard shoulder muscles. “Although the way those panelists were snipping at each other during the debate, it’s a wonder I’m not finely chopped liver.”

  “Thank God,” Temple said. “I really don’t know what to do. This convention seems primed for trouble, not to mention murder. Every time I try to turn the thing around, it gets worse.”

  “I’ll say,” Matt said, sounding grim.

  “What? What don’t I know now?”

  “The cops can’t guarantee I can leave in time for my ‘Midnight Hour’ show. Lark’s collapse could be medical, but the EMTs didn’t detect anything obvious. So it could be anything, including murder. So that’s how they’re treating the scene and every ‘actor’ in it. It seems the water pitcher passed through my hands to both sides of the debating tabl
e.”

  “The water pitcher? They’re thinking poisoned water? Do you know how impossible that would be?”

  “Obviously, you do.” Matt waited.

  “Water is tasteless as well as clear. It’d be almost impossible to doctor with strong poisons, which smell, taste, and look bad!”

  “I doubt I’m a serious candidate. The police just need a candidate and I was up there on the podium with all those unknown quantities.”

  Temple wrapped her hand through his arm.

  “It’s that pale Fontana Brothers suit. It made you look suspicious.”

  “It made you like it, so it’s not all bad.”

  She leaned her head against his upper arm. “I am so flummoxed here. It’s bad enough that Electra is a suspect for the first murder. If her bigamist non-ex-husband dies, she’s a shoo-in for the role of serial killer.”

  “That marriage, real or not, was ages back in time. People today don’t hold on to the bitterness of a failed marriage as long as they used to.”

  “That’s true.” She looked up at him. “But your mother did.”

  “They weren’t married.”

  “That’s why she’s so bitter.”

  “What does my mother have to do with it?”

  “It just made me remember that the body may age but the emotions don’t.”

  “That true for you and Max?”

  She reared back. “He’s out of my life. I just want it to be because I said so, not because something bad happened to him.”

  “So now you’re God?”

  “You won’t get this, or how your mother feels, unless you become a girl.”

  That made him pause. “You’re right. My mom’s furious because my father was finessed out of her life, and mine, by trickery. His relatives just told this pregnant young girl that he’d died ‘over there,’ and they’d give her a two-flat to live in and rent out the other half to keep her and the baby, and good-bye. When he was just fine! She never had any say in it, and neither did he. Now, when I found him and he wants to talk to her—sincerely, I think—she hates him, not the people who kept them apart. If that’s girl-think, I don’t get it, but I guess it makes sense to her, at least emotionally.”

  “Said with the total clarity and sensitivity the adoring public, including me, expects from Mr. Midnight.”

  “Temple, I’ve never had a girlfriend before, much less a fiancée. Max must have had several, starting way back with Kathleen O’Connor. You have to cut me a lot of slack.”

  “But I don’t want to cut you slack.” She grabbed him by the creamy Fontana Brothers lapels. “Not one bit. I want you on your toes, working to make me a very happy girl.”

  “That’s not work.”

  “That makes me want to make you a very happy boy.”

  “I think we’re in sync on the personal front. What can I do here and now? I have to put in my time with the detectives, but then I’m yours.”

  “Report back to me on everything they want to know about. Meanwhile, I’m going to cruise this crazy, mixed-up crowd to see what I can find out.”

  When Matt had vanished into the frantic stew of milling red-and-purple women, Temple began to circulate. She often did her best work—in PR and as an unofficial PI—while eavesdropping.

  Rumor was making the rounds, but benignly. Word was one of the Black Hat Brotherhood guys had suffered a heart attack. Poor fellow, but that Type A behavior no doubt brought it on. Why won’t middle-aged ever men listen and slow down?

  The Black Hat Brotherhood was slowing down now, after the shock of Elmore’s collapse. Temple had seen their hats lined up at the Crystal Court bar, as they knocked back some high-octane liquid tranquilizers. Elmore’s attack had unnerved them as well as the women in the audience.

  Many of the women here were widows. A man collapsing at the debate table revived their memories and losses.

  Several women were zooming around on motorized scooters, lacking mobility but making up for it by driving as if racing in the Indy 500. Everywhere, she spotted signs of female zest. These seasoned women were not going to let themselves become invisible, just as they weren’t afraid to look bizarre while clinging to the epitome of feminine accessories despite sagging chins and boobs and butts, varicose-veined legs, drawn-on eyebrows, purple and red wigs, every exaggerated feminine grace that age was assumed to strip away. And they reveled in flouting the politically correct act of fading into a corner and dying.

  Temple had never seen so many sparkling eyes, whether under white hair or gaudy wig. Every gal here was a one-woman support group for every other gal here. One, in her late eighties, had driven in from California, Red Hat regalia packed in her red convertible.

  The red and purple colors everywhere made even the feeblest woman look vibrant. Temple was soaking up energy. Zap! That she had even for a moment thought thirty-one was a significant birthday seemed so incredibly shallow now that she wanted to run around the block thirty-one times in penance, and a Las Vegas Strip block was gigantic!

  And penance was a Catholic concept, Matt’s hang-up, not hers.

  And yet. She was beginning to see that she’d be as baffled by Max’s instant and unhailed defection in thirty years as now. And that a sixty-something her would still have a thirtyish heart, and memory, as these women did.

  So. This killing and perhaps attempted killing weren’t silly senior citizen affairs, but possibly came from the still-living heart of what may have happened decades ago. Our bodies aged, but our deepest, dearest . . . and darkest . . . emotions didn’t.

  How could a callow, thirty-going-on-thirty-one filly like her solve mysteries of the heart leading to murder at the other end of the age kaleidoscope?

  Chapter 30

  Mad as a Hatter

  “I am so humiliated,” Miss Midnight Louise says.

  I am so amazed. I did not think anything could humiliate this feline Gloria Steinem.

  Gloria Steinem is a passé name in the media world now. Have you noticed what rare birds major media feminists are nowadays? Myself, I could not be happier about it. After witnessing the brouhaha outside the Crystal Phoenix, I am thinking my sympathies lie with the Black Hat Brotherhood. I do not wear a hat, but I am black.

  Miss Midnight Louise is black like me and she does not wear a hat, but I sense that we have our differences, as usual.

  “Those Black Hat Brotherhood thugs,” she fusses. “Turning my turf into a circus act.”

  “You think that the Red Hat ladies were not already doing that?”

  “Only in the sense of admirable joie de vivre.”

  Okay, my “joie” is about to go DOA. Dead On Arrival. “You have to admit that they are a rather . . . feathery . . . lot,” I say.

  “It is all in the name of fun.”

  “The last time I looked, pursuing feathers was in the name of survival for our species.”

  “Only in the wild. And in the wild, the male of the species is usually the more colorful and flagrant. That is so unfair. It is only right that these Red Hat Sisterhood ladies opt for a brighter plumage in their mature years.”

  “So what can I look forward to you wearing in your mature years, which are admittedly a fair ways off?”

  “Not a flamingo fedora,” she says, referring to my unfortunate brief stint as a cat food commercial huckster wearing that obnoxious article.

  Gadzooks, Midnight Louie is cooked! I did not think anyone remembered my ill-fated venture into TV stardom. The greatest and most effective weapon of a female, what makes her indeed deadlier than the male, is a long memory.

  “This was a put-up job,” I comment.

  “I thought so too. Your Miss Temple was caught flat-footed, which is hard to do with a person as prone to wearing stiletto heels as she is.”

  “Flat-footed at first. That is permissible. The last I saw, she was flying around like a madwoman trying to put a lid on things.”

  “I see we are back to the subject of hats,” she notes.

  “Yes. It is odd
that no one much wears hats today, and yet they are so central to this case.”

  “Central how?”

  “A plethora of hats at a convention can hide a lot of things.”

  “Identities,” she suggests.

  “Yes.”

  “Weapons?”

  “Could be. The crown of a hat can conceal a lot. Not to mention all the hatboxes being toted into this hotel.”

  “Humph. The best concealing headgear so far is the high-crowned ten-gallon hats those would-be cowboys affect.”

  “Yup,” I say.

  “They are the loose cannons in this convention.”

  “But they are not in this convention. They are convention-crashers.”

  “I wonder why.”

  “They have grievances, or think they do.”

  “Still, why make a spectacle of themselves?”

  “Their so-called ex-better halves are having all the fun?”

  “That is a silly motive. Men are used to going off and drinking beer and shooting things all on their own. Why should they deny the women in their lives the harmless hobbies of shopping, spending money, and looking outrageous?”

  “All those things you describe could be addictions to the weak human personality.”

  “As if you are not addicted to catnip and female gullibility!”

  “Females? Gullible? Louise. Please.”

  “Some are,” she says softly. “And these women with their red chapeaux and Chardonnay and brave spirits are fighting off what could be a lonely old age with others of their kind. Ma Barker is such a one, with no mate, no certain home, and many dependents to look after.”

  “She will have a home,” I growl. “At the Circle Ritz. I just have to get my people’s attention off the hullabaloo and homicide here so I can enlighten them on what is needed under their very noses and on their doorstep.”

  “That is very noble of you, Dadster.”

  I cringe, as usual, at the impudent form of address.

  She muses on. “I am not about to let Mr. Max go gently into that dark night. I find the doings at his address most suspicious and intend to stake it out indefinitely. So I guess you will have to spring Miss Electra Lark from suspicion, or Ma Barker and her gang will have traipsed the length of Las Vegas, at your recommendation, from Nowheresville to Nothingsville for naught.”