Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Leopard Spot

“Fashion, I suppose. And a weird kind of tribute to her husband’s business? But what did you think of her, as a man?”

“She comes across as sexually predatory, but I sense no heart in it. It’s automatic. If anything, I’d suspect she’s frigid.”

“That eliminates a hot affair with Rafi.”

“She might be able to fake it to get what she wants.”

“Which is…was…hubby dead?”

“I charged in there like the Ugly American in Tunisia, ready to buy the place up from the get-go. And she was perfectly willing to entertain my offer. He’s dead. She sells, takes the money, and runs before the authorities close the whole shebang down.”

After a pause, Max glanced at Temple. “How do you read the perfect secretary?”

“Courtney? Oddly like Leonora. I mean, wearing all that gold big-game jewelry—They could be clones.”

“All big-game hunters’ women wear that stuff. You see it at big-game conventions. The men buy traps and guns, the women gold trophies in jewelry.”

“You’ve been at a big-game hunter’s convention?”

Max shrugged modestly. “In the performance of my duty. That’s why I recognize the charm bracelets.”

“Clones. But not in the face.” A rough patch of terrain jolted some new ideas into her head.

“You think in the bedroom?” Max sometimes read her mind.

“Well…Courtney did strike me as the mistress type. But I sense that she’s out in the cold, so what would she gain from killing Cyrus? Nothing, except a loss of position.”

“If that’s her only position.”

“There’s more than horizontal for mistresses?”

“There is if she’s got another agenda.”

“What? Max! Don’t gloat. What did I miss?”

“I don’t think you missed it, I just think you didn’t draw the proper conclusion.”

“Oooh! It’s the jewelry, right?”

He nodded.

“So what’s so special about ostentatious”—here she waggled her ring finger at him—“expensive baubles? Theirs are all animal-based designs. Heavy. Obviously eighteen-karat gold. Crude trophies when you think of the creatures that are killed by the men in their lives.” Temple thought and jolted and stared at Sahara-style sand.

“Wait. Courtney wore one piece that wasn’t clunky and ostentatious and representative of big game. That wiry pendant, really thin. Delicate.”

Max’s profile was grinning.

“ That’s why you did that salaam over her hand with your nose in her cleavage!”

“She doesn’t have any cleavage. Believe me, I know.”

“Neither do I, but I don’t get those big-time bows. You were checking out the pendant.”

“And—?”

“And it didn’t look like anything, just some lines joined together.” Temple pictured the oddly subtle charm in question. Her mind suddenly inflated it from two inches square to two feet square.

“Max! It’s the…thingie drawn on the floor where Professor Jeff was killed. At the University of Nevada campus. The out-of-skew house shape a kid would draw. Courtney is with the Synth?”

“The Synth is apparently behind the CC’s leopard being kidnapped. Maybe she’s the reason it ended up at the Rancho Exotica.”

“And who is the reason the leopard ended up alone together with a dead Cyrus Van Burkleo?”

Max lifted his profile to the horizon, dreaming as he drove. Why not, there was nothing out here but rattlesnakes and cactus and ruts?

“Cyrus. It almost sounds like Osiris.”

“If a leopard could be Irish.”

Max winced. “Don’t remind me of that. The Synth seems fond of the arcane. Maybe there’s a cosmic balance in a leopard named Osiris being on the death scene of a man named Cyrus. A balance, do you think?”

“The Synth is against trophy hunting?”

“The Synth may do its own form of trophy hunting, but I suspect—what would you call a gang of rogue prestidigitators…a sleight of magicians?—would be protective of the big cats they have traditionally worked with. Maybe the Synth was killing two birds with one stone: stopping Van Burkleo, and inconveniencing the Cloaked Conjuror.”

“Then the Synth never meant to harm the leopard.”

“No. I think the Synth is strictly interested in interspecies mayhem. Interprofession actually.”

“It’s much more likely that the women in his life killed Van Burkleo. He wasn’t a rogue magician. He was just a greedy egoist.”

“Then whatever the Synth’s peripheral games, we’re back to the women in the case.”

They rode in silence for a while. Cyrus Van Burkleo, the big-game hunter, seemed to have met his match and ended up dead. Leopard Lady and Synth Woman.

“I can’t really understand the woman,” Max said.

“Leonora?”

“Yes. Unless I learn why she had turned herself into a plastic surgeon’s playground. Could a smooth PR woman weasel her surgeon’s name out of her?”

“Maybe. But it could be somebody out of the country. I wonder how many U.S. surgeons would be willing to do that to a human face?”

“With enough money,” Max said, “you’d be surprised.”

* * *

“Was it a good Agatha Christie foreplay?” Max asked with a grin as he dropped Temple off in the Circle Ritz parking lot.

She grimaced as she got out, reacting to both her ride on the jolting Jeep and his lame joke.

“It sure wasn’t a climax,” she said, “but it was a good A.G. moment: an isolated camp in the desert, a cast of privileged and power-hungry people, the roar of the beasts in the distance, killing outside and in—”

He took off with a wave, the emerald ring safe in his breast pocket. Temple slogged toward the building, wishing the old pool had a new hot tub. She’d have to mention that potential improvement to Electra.

In fact, she saw the landlady’s pink Probe pulling in right now…only it was white.

Huh?

Only the driver wasn’t Electra, but Matt.

Double huh?

She stopped cold. “Am I seeing things?” she asked as he got out and headed toward the side door without noticing her.

Matt whirled as if she had shot at him. “What?”

“Your Elvismobile is parked over there. What are you doing driving Electra’s car? And when did it turn white? Curiouser and curiouser.”

Matt eyed the lot, nervously. “We’d better get in.” He trotted for the door and stood holding it open for her like a parking valet.

She looked at the sky. No rain coming. And she couldn’t hurry at this point. She trudged toward the door. “I don’t get it.”

The minute she put a foot on one small step into the building, he was pushing behind her and shutting the door.

He practically pushed her right into the wall.

“Matt! What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. I’ve been awfully busy lately, that’s all. I’d better get upstairs and check my answering machine.”

“What? No lobby chitchat?”

“Sorry. It’s been frantic.”

He preceded her down the hall to the building’s small black marble-lined lobby so quickly that she couldn’t keep up with him.

When she got there, the space was empty. Both elevators were on the main floor, doors open, so he couldn’t have taken one. He was using the stairs?

Curious, she went to the stair door and opened it, listening for footsteps above.

Nothing.

Either he had run up the stairs already, or…he had simply vanished.

Or…The opposite door to the hall leading to the wedding chapel caught her eye.

Maybe…

She was never too tired to solve a puzzle. Besides, she had a deep personal dislike of men disappearing on her.

Temple opened the door, listened to the silence beyond, then penetrated it.

Electra’s drive-by wedding business was booming, but the big hotels with their fancy chapels had stolen the wedding bells from the tiny, quaint Lover’s Knot.