Cat in a Sapphire Slipper Read online

  Seeing her whizzing by on a sleek vintage motorcycle, engine screaming like a banshee to live up to the model’s name, would be pretty scary, Temple thought.

  “What are twelve men going to come up with in terms of party arrangements on such short notice?” Electra glanced at Kit. “Although I do understand why you don’t want to delay your nuptials to the adoring Aldo for one more day than necessary.”

  “What did you come up with, Electra?” Van asked. “A private performance of Cirque de Sole Mio?” The disciplined pale blond hair in Van’s French twist was separating into loose tendrils. The champagne hadn’t dented her dignity, but had added a certain flair.

  “The Shemale Review at the Goliath,” Kit suggested with an arpeggio of airy laughter.

  “A private wake at the city morgue,” Temple put in.

  “Please.” Electra fluffed her helmet-flattened white curls.

  “Give me credit at least for being appropriate. No, it’s a private party at the G-Strip Club. A program of Elvis impersonators performing, with a wedding dress-garbed Priscilla popping out of the traditional cake. Elvis and Priscilla were married here in Vegas, after all.”

  “A bride stripper?” Kit asked, incredulous.

  “She’s only a slight flaunter, not a stripper.” Electra glanced at Temple. “Nothing an ex-priest couldn’t see on television.”

  “Have you seen television lately?” Temple asked. “That blond fifties cabinet model in your penthouse doesn’t look fully functional. Network is getting as racy as cable. I will admit, though, that since the brothers helped me out as Elvis impersonators a while back, that is an appropriate form of entertainment for Aldo’s bachelor party.”

  Electra waved a plump hand. “Would I let you ladies suffer a moment of insecurity? Even the Priscilla is a wholesome little wisp of a thing.”

  Temple narrowed her eyes while sipping her third glass of champagne. They could all crash in Van and Nicky’s place tonight. When he finally stumbled into their pajama party, he could sleep in the bathtub. Or so Van had stated.

  Of course it was a roomy two-person, jetted tub.

  “ ‘Wholesome little thing.’ ” Something had penetrated Temple’s bubble-lulled brain. “Electra, you didn’t! You didn’t hire that poor, pathetic juvenile delinquent stepdaughter of miserable Crawford Buchanan’s? Quincey?”

  “I did. She’s still pursuing a performing career, and it’s running away from her faster than she can cat-walk. You know our guys will be perfect gentlemen all.”

  “Well, mostly,” Van conceded with a ladylike hiccup. “Nicky promised to be home by one A.M. and to bring Matt with him. To drop Matt off at the Circle Ritz, rather.”

  They all glanced at the tall crystal plinth of an ultramodern grandfather clock against one wall of the huge living room. Past midnight.

  “Boys will be boys,” Kit remarked apropos of nothing. “I can’t believe I’m finally getting married.”

  “Let’s see,” Van remarked, speaking slowly as one mainlining unaccustomed champagne should. “I’ve been married once. You and Temple have never been married but are hurtling toward the altar, or the justice of the peace, and Electra has been married—”

  “Five times.” She shrugged her floral-swathed shoulders. “It took practice in the old days. Here.” She raised her glass. Van filled it. “A toast to our blushing brides.”

  “Do you blush?” Kit asked Temple.

  “Unfortunately, yes.”

  “Ooh! I can’t wait to take pictures at your wedding. You and Matt will make the most swooningly precious couple.”

  “Aunt. You’re sloshed. Please do not apply the word precious to me and mine.”

  “Not even to that old softie, Midnight Louie?”

  “Especially not to Midnight Louie!”

  “Where do you suppose he is tonight?” Kit’s gaze grew sentimental. “Out on the town himself, courting some feline fatale.”

  “Gag,” Temple said. “I sincerely hope this champagne makes us forget everything we said tonight. A bachelor party may be a little gross, but a bachelorette party is Soupy Central. Why do I sense the guys are having a lot more fun than we are?”

  Van topped off her glass, which had somehow gone dry.

  “They’ll have hangovers to enter The Guinness Book of World Records, but they’ll feel pleased with themselves and their one-night rebellion. Men!”

  “Men!” Kit echoed, lifting her glass. “You can’t live with them, and you can’t live without them.”

  “Men,” Temple said. And smiled.

  “Men.” Electra frowned. “I wish you girls better luck with ‘em than I’ve had.”

  “It’s kinda nice,” Van said, sliding down onto her usually steel spine as she cosseted her champagne glass, “to know they’re having a last bit of brotherly, boyish fun tonight. Nicky could use a break from the executive suite. And Aldo . . . Kit, he is a Prince Charming. They are all.”

  “To all Prince Charmings,” Temple said, lifting her glass. “Wherever they are!”

  She thought immediately, with an unwanted, slightly tipsy pang, of Max.

  Then she chugalugged the champagne. There was nowhere she had to be tonight. Nothing she had to do.

  Nothing but relax and enjoy.

  So why was she worried?

  Garden of Lies

  and Spies

  The air outside his window was crisp, fragrant. Wonderful.

  He inhaled deeply as Garry Randolph wheeled him around the terraced gardens in the clear mountain sunlight.

  The man wasn’t a matinee idol, but he had a silver tongue. He’d convinced the dubious nurse that the patient could use some fresh air.

  No one else wandered these high mountain meadow paths. The views at great heights above and depths below were breathtaking. He knew this must be alien terrain for him because it enchanted him so much. But Randolph would have told him the hills were alive with the sound of listening devices.

  Once they were behind a sheltering stand of pines, Randolph quickly knelt and examined the wheelchair to the rims. Then he’d pantomimed a request for “Mike” to pat himself down, though the loose hospital gown didn’t allow for concealment.

  Then Randolph had inspected his casts, thoroughly enough to cause pain, and felt the gown tie-strings.

  “Why would my room and I be bugged?” he asked when Randolph nodded the okay for speaking.

  “You’re here because someone tried to kill you.”

  “Not on a mountain.”

  “God, no. You’d never waste your time risking your neck just for the heck of it.”

  “But I have risked my life.”

  Randolph nodded. “You’ve always worked without a net, but never without an escape plan. Listen, until you’re able to get around on your own, I don’t want you knowing too much about yourself. If someone should get ahold of you and start asking questions, I want you to retain a certain amount of honest ignorance. That can’t be faked. Not even by you.”

  “What am I? Who?”

  Randolph shook his head. “Can’t say yet. I can say someone meant to kill you, and you survived. As soon as you can walk, we’re out of here.”

  “For where?”

  Randolph lowered his voice. “I’ve got some very interesting leads in Ireland.”

  “That where I live?”

  The man shook his head. “I’ve been your handler for seventeen years. Trust me. I know best.”

  “ ‘Handler.’ I’m some kind of . . . pet? A spy?”

  Randolph chuckled and patted his shoulder. “Much more interesting than that, dear boy. No, your job here is to get better and hold the foxes at bay. The longer you appear to be the victim of total amnesia, the safer you’ll be.”

  “I am the victim of total amnesia!” In frustration, he launched the wheelchair forward when his legs wouldn’t do the job. The mechanism was slick. The chair shot toward the walkway’s edge.

  Randolph followed and stopped it with a speed and agility that surp
rised him, even as his stomach twisted to feel the chair teetering on the edge of a sharp fall into the deep green valley below.

  “Don’t be impetuous,” Randolph said. “You never were. I understand your frustration, but you can’t afford theatrics here. Slow and steady win the race. The longer you can play the medical staff along, the better off we’ll both be. I can get you out of here PDQ, if I have to.”

  “Can the staff be trusted?”

  “No. Anyone can infiltrate any medical facility, and has.”

  He frowned. Maybe he wasn’t a mountain climber, but he must have taken some heavy risks to be this valuable—or dangerous—to someone.

  “What do you remember?” the man asked.

  “About me, my life, my friends, my family, where I lived, went to school? Nothing.”

  Randolph’s expressive face puckered with distress. Personal distress.

  He felt obliged to console the old fellow.

  “I do know a lot of things about the larger world. I guessed where I was. I seem to be . . . highly observant. I don’t like to be helpless. I don’t trust. I’ve been building my upper body strength to compensate for the casts on my legs. I’ve started moving them from the hip, though it hurts like hell. I’m not taking my knockout meds like a good little boy.”

  Randolph was nodding sagely. “Your instincts are inbred. That’s what saved you in the . . . accident.”

  “How?”

  “You saw the brutal impact coming. You did what few people can manage in a crisis. You let your body go limp so it didn’t fight the blow. You also bowed your head into your arms, avoiding brain injury.”

  “I seem to have scraped my pellucid skin pretty damn hard.”

  “And your vocabulary doesn’t seem to have suffered.”

  Old man Randolph grinned. He felt his scabbed cheek stretching painfully to grin back. Still, it felt good.

  “So I knew what I was doing. I wasn’t an incompetent ass.”

  “Never.”

  “What was I doing? Where did I fall?”

  “I don’t want to give you specifics, although you’ve trained to resist truth serums. You intended to ‘drop out’ from your current life, your current role, because some very nasty people were after you. You arranged your own accidental exit. Then someone else lent you an unsuspected helping hand. Only your lightning reflexes, superb physical condition, and raw nerve saved you from instant annihilation.”

  “Lightning reflexes and raw nerve. You think I still have them? The superb physical condition is shot.”

  “Indubitably. Trust your survival instincts. You’ll recover the rest with time. But trust no one, except me. I’ve brought you a world away from the scene of the attempted murder, but we’re dealing with an international . . . force here. I want you out of here as soon as you can limp away. Meanwhile, play the slowly recuperating invalid. Especially in the area of your memory. The more you remember, the more you endanger yourself.”

  He nodded. The advice was useful . . . if he was really James Bond. See. He remembered all the petty, pop culture stuff, the learned-in-school stuff, just nothing about himself.

  He considered further, then nodded. “They’ve sicced a psychiatrist on me to work on my memory.”

  Randolph sighed. “The formidably brilliant and attractive Doctor Schneider.”

  “You think she’s an enemy?”

  “She is if she teases your personal memory back too soon. Do you think you can keep her dangling without learning anything?”

  He thought. “A challenge. She’s very good at what she does.

  I’m not quite sure what exactly that is yet. I’ll enjoy finding out.” He glanced at the older man. “Apparently I’m heterosexual?”

  The hazel eyes twinkled. “Seriously.”

  He smiled. Max whoever-the-hell-he-was smiled. Even though it hurt.

  “Let the games begin.”

  Boys Just Want

  to Have Fun

  Once the Fontana brothers and Uncle Mario are bound (but not gagged), their captors pause to shake out shiny heads of variously colored hair like show cats flaunting themselves before a captive audience.

  And the Fontana brothers start spitting out a series of feminine first names. Obviously, this is not stranger-on-stranger crime.

  And, just as obviously, the boys are not one bit amused by the revelation.

  “What kind of cockamamie deal is this?” Uncle Mario demands of the women and his nephews. “I do not care who knows who, nobody disarms the Fontanas. If you know these dizzy dames, boys, you better get some bridles on them before they ride you all to the branding station.”

  While the women boo and hiss Uncle Mario, the guys fight their bonds, no longer respectful of the firearms and furious at being corralled by their own girls.

  “We used to know them,” Ernesto says coldly. “Before we found out what crazies they were. I am not kidding. Let us loose, or you will be sorry.”

  “We are sorry already,” one woman says. “You are all ready to mount up and celebrate Aldo’s getting married, but you would not consider any of us for the altar to save your lives.”

  “Maybe to save our lives,” Aldo puts in. He gives his brothers and uncle a cautioning glance. “We know who still holds the firepower, and the keys to our handcuffs, and maybe our hearts.”

  One of the women dangles a set of keys small enough for a jewelry box.

  The brothers boo her.

  “Now, guys,” Aldo says. “I can see why they are so steamed. I am getting married, but we all went off to party without them, and I have not exactly seen you buying any engagement rings and doing likewise.”

  “That is no reason to take us prisoner,” Julio grumbles.

  “Prisoners of love,” one girl coos.

  I feel a hairball coming on.

  But Aldo leaps on opportunity. “See, guys! The girls just want to prove to you that they can give you a better time than any bachelor party paid escort. It is a matter of hurt pride.”

  “You think?” Ralph asks.

  “They are sure not doing this because they want me or Uncle Mario in their manicured clutches, right, girls?”

  Uncle Mario curses under his breath, but the girls’ cries and whispers overwhelm him.

  “Girls just want to have fun,” a breathy blonde promises, stepping nearer the bound brothers.

  Cocking their dark heads en masse, the Fontana brothers begin to see the light. They produce a chorus of persuasive pleas to release them so they can start having some of that “fun” the girls crave.

  The women respond by sitting en masse on their laps.

  I turn my head away. This scene is getting way too kinky for a street dude.

  “It is just the prelude to a friendly lap-dance,” Satin tells me. “I would think that you would be relieved that your friends have been hijacked for hanky-panky rather than murder and mayhem.”

  “Please, Satin! You do not mean to say you are familiar with such inappropriate intimacies?”

  “I am a mother of five, however long removed from the domestic scene. This is nothing, Louie. My many mistresses do this several times a day.”

  “I am busting you out of this sordid environment as soon as I free the Fontanas! You are riding in a stretch limo with me, back to the Circle Ritz.”

  “Circle Ritz? Is that a rival brothel?”

  “It is not! It is a quaint, classy residence off the Strip. My human roommate, the clever and tenacious Miss Temple Barr, and I share quarters there. Purely platonic, of course. She sometimes helps me with my cases. A human ally can come in handy for the foot and phone work.”

  “There is a lot of foot and phone work at the Sapphire Slipper too.”

  I watch in horror as the captors push their tootsies out of their black cowboy boot–style mules to rub their naked feet up the ankles of the helpless Fontana boys.

  “Louie! They are merely teasing.”

  In fact, the Fontanas are watching the revealed faces of their tormentors
with sudden interest and smiles.

  “What is going on, girls?” Aldo asks. He is the only brother not occupied by, and with, a latter-day Charlie’s Angel hussy. “This was supposed to be a stag party, and it certainly was not supposed to be held at a men’s entertainment emporium.”

  “Like you mind,” one girl jeers, twining her fingertips in Ernesto’s . . . or Emilio’s or . . . who-knows-who’s shiny black hair. (I have to admit dudes like me are pretty irresistible to the feminine contingent.)

  “I mind,” Aldo says simply. “I am the bridegroom-in-waiting. My bride would not appreciate this ambiance. She would kick major butt over it. Yours. Not mine.”

  “He is just lonesome,” pouts another girl, running her forefinger down Rico’s or Eduardo’s or Ralph’s chest, no doubt in search of the thick black well-groomed chest hair the Fontana brothers and I share. Females of any species cannot resist that.

  “I am not,” Aldo spits out. “This is supposed to be my party. You and my cappuccino-foam-headed brothers owe me an explanation for ruining it.”

  “That is telling them, Aldo,” Macho Mario spits out even louder.

  He also is unharassed, but, unlike Aldo, is looking none too happy about it.

  Meanwhile, the ladies of the establishment pout along the walls in an unhappy clot, watching outsiders usurp their usual role.

  Manx! Two whole sets of rival women for one large litter of dudes. For all the protestations of innocence, this could get ugly! And the Fontana boys are the territory that will be fought over.

  Hey. I kind of like the role reversal. I usually have to fight all comers for the feline fatale of my choice. Might be nice to have the ladies tussle over me for a change . . .

  “Forget it, Louie,” Satin says softly, sounding way too much like Midnight Louise. “This is a very odd situation. Nothing good can come of it.”

  “You are serious?”

  “I have changed my mind. I want the Sapphire Slipper back to the sleazy, raucous, venal, boozy place I know and love. This sexy stuff here is not the paid-for kind. It is really dangerous.”

  What can I say? I am speechless, like the Fontana brothers. Of course even I know that the safe, state-regulated brothels are not a substitute for love and marriage. What can Satin be talking about? She has been corrupted by the sex trade. Imagine, finding her after all this time? A fallen feline!