Cat in a Red Hot Rage Read online

  Sigh. Miss Midnight Louise sure knows how to sand the luster off a guy’s topcoat.

  But the kit has it right. If I wish my easily distractible Circle Ritz gang to get on with the program and help my disenfranchised kind, I will have to solve this murder for them. Again.

  Amazing. I take on a little job of rehabilitation for the homeless. Then, suddenly, I am whiskers deep in homicide and red hats and it is not even a Vatican conspiracy thriller. Call it my Givenchy Code.

  Only in Las Vegas.

  Chapter 31

  E-mailed to Death

  While musing about murder and the middle-aged woman, Temple was almost run over by a red scooter manned . . . womaned by a P and R lady with a gorgeous golden Persian cat riding shotgun.

  Hey! Wasn’t that one of Savannah Ashleigh’s Persians? Louie had been sweet on the silver one, to the point of earning him a false paternity suit. The golden one had been sweet where her sister and mistress had been sour.

  But . . . would Savannah Ashleigh really allow one of her precious Persians to hot-rod around the convention floor on a hot red scooter? Nah. Not if she knew, and maybe her attention these days was all on Taco and Belle.

  Meanwhile, Temple’s hot silver cell phone text message revealed a call to order. The Red-Hatted League required a “confab,” having dug up lots of “sensitive info.”

  Temple returned to her designated conference room, the door still manned by a Fontana brother, just a different one every time.

  “The ladies have preceded you into the room,” Eduardo said. “I’ve ordered several light cocktails to hold them. At great personal risk,” he added. “They have a propensity for doing weapons searches.”

  “On Fontana brothers, or the general population?”

  Eduardo frowned. “Lamentably, they seem inclined to bless us with the most personal attention. ‘Lend a woman a Lexus, and she thinks she owns it. Give a woman a wink, and she thinks she owns you.’ These are fun ladies, really. Remind me of my grandma Belladonna.”

  “You don’t want to mention that ‘grandma’ part in this crowd. Trust me.”

  Eduardo shrugged. “I’m off in two hours. Ralph can watch his own butt.”

  Temple sighed. She was sure Eduardo meant that last comment literally. Still, good help was hard to find at a major national convention, and she needed nonpolice sources.

  Her entrance evoked a round of applause.

  “Have we got ‘mail,’” Alice said.

  “E-mail,” Phyll added. “Yup. That stuff never goes away on the Internet, if you know where to look.”

  At the moment, Phyll looked like an extremely smug purple and redheaded nuthatch.

  Temple sat down, ready to take copious notes.

  “Here’s the deal,” Judy said. “ ‘The Black Hat Brotherhood’ isn’t just some macho group that just sprang up. Two of its founders are disgruntled Red Hat Sisterhood ex-spouses.”

  “Elmore?”

  Judy nodded.

  “So you’re saying that some of the women here might be murderers?”

  “You do not get it, Little Pink.”

  Temple took umbrage. To them, she was not only small, she was young and green. And pink!

  “This stuff is not just sixties’ generation carping,” Phyll added. “It digs down deep. The Red Hat Sisterhood is fairly new on the scene, only a few years old.”

  “But the reason for its existence is eternal,” Judy said, portentously.

  Always look for a librarian to be portentous. They’d earned it. They knew what everybody else had forgotten. Temple had never thought of librarians as pit bulls with bifocals before.

  But the incriminating information Judy and Phyll had dug up in a few short hours was amazing. They’d returned with reams of printouts cradled on the crooks of their arms like freshly printed thousand-dollar bills.

  “There’s that much hard info out there on our victims and suspects?” she asked.

  “There’s that much information out there on you and me,” Phyll said. “Hey, don’t hyperventilate, Temple. Just kidding. A lot of this stuff is bits and pieces of Oleta’s unpublished memoirs.”

  “That looks like more than enough to publish,” Temple observed as the papers hit the conference tabletop. She’d usually only heard papers make such a substantial “smack” when heaving the Sunday New York Times to her coffee table top . . . when Max had gotten one as preface to a lazy day of reading in bed.

  The memory saddened her. An engaged girl with puzzles to solve shouldn’t be sad. Temple picked up the top page and started skimming. It was a digest printout. Oleta’s e-mail address had been [email protected]. That significant numeral made it scary to contemplate how many mad, mad, mad madwomen were out there.

  The weird part was that being a woman scorned had come to Oleta after she had made Electra into one. Didn’t Oleta and women like her understand that you reap what you sow? What goes around comes around? Though men certainly didn’t seem to get that, either.

  Temple sat down slowly, reading.

  This was disastrous. The current segment described Electra as a vengeful harpy, aching to get into a literal catfight with the tender young innocent that Oleta portrayed herself as having been. Her memoirs made a strong case for Elmore needing to use any means to escape the Electra Oleta portrayed, even to marrying another woman without the formality of a divorce.

  Women who made a habit of poaching other women’s men often made the cast-off wife the villain. Until it was their turn.

  “It doesn’t look good for Electra,” Alice agreed, reading silently over Temple’s shoulder. “It’s almost as if Oleta had planted a motive for Electra in these e-mails.”

  “ ‘Almost as if,’ heck no! That’s exactly what she did.”

  Temple stood up, excited. “What if the wrong victim died? What if Oleta had always intended to kill Elmore here, and blame Electra for it? If the widely distributed ‘peeks’ at her memoirs were a setup?”

  “That would be pretty fiendish,” Phyll said.

  “But perfect. She mentions Elmore as resenting her Red Hat Sisterhood activities and book project. And he must have been a member of the Black Hat Brotherhood for some time. Why? Ironically, maybe he was going to kill her after she left him? Maybe did? She could have known that the Black Hats would be here protesting this convention, and she knew Electra lived in Las Vegas.”

  “How’d she know that?” asked Judy.

  “Electra runs the Lovers’ Knot Wedding Chapel. Those chapels are always making the news. Bretangelo, pop stars Bret Aspen and Laura D’Angelo, got married at her chapel just a couple months ago. That generated press all over the country.”

  “Isn’t a ‘tangelo’ a hybrid fruit?” Alice wondered.

  “There have been rumors about her,” Starla said darkly. “That mango-blond hair job!”

  “Aren’t they divorced already?” Judy asked.

  “Well, yeah,” Temple said. “Stars marry and adopt and divorce at the drop of a scandal sheet these days. Las Vegas and Reno are conveniently close for both ends of the cycle. I hope those babes keep the third-world kids longer than they keep the Rodeo Drive husbands.”

  Red-hatted heads shook in agreement and sorrow at what the world of international celebrity had come to.

  “Elmore Lark was attacked too. But why after Oleta,” Judy objected.

  Temple thought. “His illness sure could be an attack. Maybe he was meant to die first? Maybe the method, whatever it was, had been set in motion. Poison, say. It had to be that if he hasn’t just suffered a stroke or heart attack. Poison is a murder method with a very forgiving timeline.”

  “How? Oleta couldn’t foresee the debate?”

  “Maybe the method that made him collapse had nothing to do with the debate.”

  “Or the water pitcher. That would get your significant other off the hook.”

  For a second, Temple assumed that Phyll was referring to Max. He sure was habit-forming when it came to scrapes and sche
mes.

  But, no, her SO now was Matt, and she herself had managed to get him involved in a possible attempted murder case.

  “Does this look like a real book?” she asked Judy of the printouts. “Or just random parts?”

  “Hard to tell. It does dwell a lot on her meeting Elmore thirty years ago and winning him away from Electra. ‘Weaning’ was the way she put it.”

  “Ugh,” Temple said. “ ‘Weaning’ a man off his wife. Makes you wonder why she lasted as long among the living as she did.”

  “Anyway, it’s hard to tell whether she was accentuating the negative because she was now bitter and alone, or because she wanted to spill everything and make things hot for Elmore.”

  “It’s hard to believe a legitimate publisher would be that interested in a sad old tale like that. Can you find out how real a deal Oleta Lark had for this so-called memoir?”

  “Hey,” Phyll said. “If the truth is out there on the Worldwide Web, a librarian can find it.”

  “I’m not so sure—” Temple began when Judy jumped in.

  “The ordinary author wouldn’t spread all that material free over the Web, you’d think.”

  “That’s the smart way to market these days,” Alice objected. “Tease ’em with a free sample, hopefully scandalous, on the Web. That’s how you build buzz.”

  Temple nodded. “And if you were out to slander someone, that’d be the perfect way to start. Oleta seems to have been a pretty vengeful person.”

  “She writes a lot,” Starla added, “about finding salvation and self-esteem through the Red Hat Sisterhood. The title is Confessions of a Randy Red Hat Woman.”

  Temple the PR maven bristled at that. “That title wasn’t going to sit well with the organization and most members. Talk about a million motives for murder.”

  “Maybe she was using us as the first line of assault,” Alice suggested, “but she seemed sincere. She’d joined three years ago and was hugely gung ho. In fact, she planned to debut her Red Hot Hattery Shop at this convention, then open one in Reno.”

  “She set up shop here for the first time.” Temple seized on that. “Just in time for the ‘Big Wheel in Las Vegas’ convention.” Temple considered. “That’s savvy marketing, but does it also disguise a different agenda here? We need to ask the other members of the Reno Scarlet Women what Oleta seemed like. Does the Red Hat Sisterhood Web site list all the different chapters in the country?”

  “Sure thing, sugar.” Starla snapped her cinnamon gum, exhaling a spicy scent. “We’re a network. We like to know all about each other. Our Red-Hatted League was even featured in one of the recent magazines.”

  “Was Electra mentioned or pictured in the national magazine, say, recently?”

  “Of course!” Judy said. “Yes! That’s right. Oleta would have seen that. Mentioned and pictured. She is our Red-Hatted League head-woman, after all.”

  “Hmmm.” Temple was thinking that she ought to look up the Sherlock Holmes short story that gave this particular chapter its name. Might be some vague connection to events in the here and now.

  Who knows?

  And speaking of that, she needed to find out what the police knew by now about the attack on Elmore, if it was attempted murder. Who was prime for squealing?

  The ever-sympathetic Morrie Alch, of course.

  Chapter 32

  Ms. Sherlock Strikes

  a Holmes Run

  It was amazing what you could find on the Internet, Temple mused for the millionth time when she hit her home computer that evening.

  So, thinking of “headed,” Temple had typed “The Red-Headed League” on a search engine along with the surname “Doyle.” She’d found a version of the story in question as fast as you could say “Sherlock Holmes.”

  She’d read all the Holmes stories as a kid, but had forgotten most of them. Luckily, this particular tale had been read by a girl already being teased about her “fire-engine” red hair. Some of her sixth-grade classmates, mostly boys, would wail like sirens whenever she came into view.

  Her mother said it was because they liked her, but that had never made sense to Temple. Her older brothers were supposed to like her, and all they could do was ditch her and dis her. Only they didn’t call it dissing then.

  So when she read the tale of Mr. Jabez Wilson in far-off, old-fashioned London, who was given a mysterious but well-paying job because of his red hair, young Temple treasured it.

  Although the notion of a Red-Headed League seeking out redhaired people for easy work and good pay turned out to be a hoax to cover a bank robbery, Temple had thrilled at the idea that red hair was special and valued and would bring her adventure and rewards.

  Her mother had previously tried to console her with that “special” idea, but she believed it more from reading Doyle’s story. She wished she’d had an interesting name to go with her interesting hair, like Mr. Jabez Wilson in the story. It took her a few more years to appreciate being named “Temple” instead of “Ashley.”

  For a couple of years, on school documents, she had written her required middle name as “Jazabelle” instead of the hated “Ursula.”

  That ended in junior high when the phys. ed. teacher, a sixtyish woman built like coach John Madden but with a plainer face, had called her “Temple Jazabelle Barr” aloud when she flunked out of basketball. (Who would put a four-foot-eleven girl in as a guard anyway?)

  That whole moniker being repeated twelve times a day by the girls in junior high was worse than the siren shrieks of the boys in grade school. So “Ursula” duly appeared on her school cards again, and thankfully no one ever said that out loud. Even the aunt for whom she was named Ursula went by the nickname of “Kit.” Temple wondered if Aldo knew that.

  Still, reading the story again had been fun. Like a lot of the Holmes stories, it showed a naive person being dragooned into a puzzling situation because a hidden schemer had a secret purpose.

  It was not unwise for a modern-day Sherlock to keep that classic formula in mind.

  Chapter 33

  Big Wheels

  It was 6:00 P.M. and Matt was wondering where his wandering SO was. So he was surprised to hear an alto female voice when he answered his cell phone.

  “I need to talk to you,” C. R. Molina said without any greeting, as usual, the busy, brusque homicide lieutenant personified.

  “Your place or mine?” he asked, determined to be playful in the face of such unrelenting social sobriety.

  “Neutral ground,” she specified.

  “Is there any in Las Vegas?”

  “For you or me, probably not. Say, seven?”

  “Charley’s Hamburgers?”

  He was a radio shrink. He could hear the hesitation before she answered. Apparently, for some reason, Charley’s wasn’t neutral ground for her.

  “Fine.” The shortness of Molina’s answer showed her annoyance with herself for what she’d felt when she heard that name and location.

  Matt would have to try to finesse the reason out of her when they met, simply because it was his job. And it never hurt to know what a homicide lieutenant thought and felt when you’d literally been front and center at a murder scene.

  “Seven, then,” he said.

  “You still driving that silver flash?”

  “Yeah. You want a spin in it?”

  “Maybe. Just maybe I do.”

  Matt eased the Crossfire into an unpaved parking spot near Charley’s. This was his first real new car, paid for and picked out by him. Being a Catholic priest with a vow of poverty for seventeen years made getting a nice car both a cherished luxury and a venial sin.

  He recognized Molina’s personal aging Toyota wagon a few spaces over and ambled over to lean down to the open driver’s window.

  Again, she wasted no time on sentimental greetings.

  “The blue cheese bacon burger,” she told him. “Hold the ketchup. Mustard, no fries. We eat in my car. When we’re all tidy again we take that spin in yours.”

 
Matt lifted an eyebrow, but nodded and went to the window. Charley’s was a small, tumbledown shack on a lowly street, no glitz, no glam, just the best darn hamburgers in town. And they were way politically incorrect on the fat and grease meter.

  Molina was right. No amount of napkins could save a car from the lethally good grease of a Charley’s burger. He ordered the Philly steakburger for himself, then made his way over the lumpy dirt of the lot to the passenger’s side of her car.

  She had the driver’s seat pushed way back to accommodate her almost six-foot frame. Matt scooted the passenger seat, set full forward for Molina’s teen daughter Mariah, back all the way so they could talk face-to-face.

  First they bit into the huge burgers, chewing them down to eatable height.

  “What’s new?” she finally asked. “Besides having your fingerprints all over a possibly lethal pitcher of hotel water?”

  “That what this is about?”

  “Among other things.” Molina bucked in her seat.

  Probably the semiautomatic at the small of her back felt bulky against the car seat, Matt thought. Packing iron must get uncomfy in this overheated climate.

  Molina was an interesting woman, strong, complex, unpredictable. Temple scoffed at her no-nonsense looks. Matt had seen nuns in civvies who dressed with more style. Her dark blunt-cut hair and strong, unmanicured eyebrows suited her. He liked her a lot, but she was a cop and she never let you forget it. And at the moment he was the dork in the center spotlight with a possibly poisoned man two places to the left and languishing in Never-Never Land at the local hospital.

  “Tell me why,” Molina said after eating her burger. She rolled her grease-soaked tissues into a small hard ball inside a fistful of flimsy diner napkins.

  He understood instantly what she meant. “Temple—”

  “Oh, God.”

  “Temple does PR for the Crystal Phoenix. You know that.”