Douglas, Nelson - Cat in a Flamingo Fedora

Flamingo-pink stuff, now that she remembered it, that smelled like ... dead flamingos, for sure.

Dead ducks. Her and Max, if caught. Red faces, and worse.

The wait and the silence grew intolerable. Time seemed motionless. Surely Max had been gone at least twenty minutes, maybe thirty. An occasional muffled thump from the other room offered some reassurance, until she wondered who else it might be.

She heard the door crack open, then a cue stick of light pointed to the floor.

"It's clear. I've got a desktop lamp on, but we don't dare use the overheads. And I turned the ceiling fan off because they might move the vertical blinds apart."

She followed his harsh whisper into the other room, but it wasn't the one she had visited more officially earlier today.

Her heart began thumping with dismay. Max was bending over the laptop computer on a desktop corner.

"What are you looking around for?" he asked.

"This isn't the office I was in today! This is the wrong place."

"Inner office. Check beyond that door, but don't open it too wide. Those vertical blinds would move at an angel's sigh."

Peering through as he had instructed, she saw Alison's desk and the copier. "I never suspected an inner office."

"Had to be someplace where the boss could duck visitors if he had to. I doubt Cooke came here much. Let the help run his business. The big computer out front is full of booking dates and tax returns. All the routine business stuff. This is where he'd stash anything private. So what are we looking for?"

"Number one, a thick manila envelope filled with letters."

"You do the drawers while I try to figure out if there are any safeguarded areas on this computer."

He put the laptop on his knees and pushed the cushy leather desk chair away from the desk the length of his long legs. Temple searched the office furniture to the accompaniment of clicking keys and the occasional balky beep of an operating system that was being pushed against its inclinations.

She took Max's nasty little flashlight to examine the inside of every drawer, then the underbelly of the desktop and the drawer bottoms. She pulled each one out to study the drawer backs.

She crawled into the kneehole and felt all the exposed and hidden surfaces. She lifted the plastic chair mat. No hidden manila envelope. She took apart the small bookshelf the same way.

She even lifted the silk jacaranda tree's pot and looked beneath it; only rusty water stains on the cream-colored carpeting. Who would water a fake plant? Maybe an office cleaning service. She poked through the real bark surrounding the phony trunk, dislodging a small spider.

The desktop was bare as Mother Hubbard's cupboard, but she checked under the desk pad and protective paper tucked into its four leatherette corners. She eyed the desk lamp, a Danish modern affair that hid nothing. The countertop under the small bookcase bore the most office litter: a coffeemaker, empty plastic-cup holders. Temple shook her head at the unreal real world. O-ring padded folders, piled up. An electric shaver, still plugged in. A recipe box painted with tole flowers, probably a silly gift put to office use. And a huge Rolodex.

Temple jumped on the Rolodex like Midnight Louie on a morsel of meat. She took it to the desk lamp and crouched down to examine the alphabetized entries under the brightest light available.

"What is Darren Cooke's daughter's name?" Max's voice sounded strained, he had been silent for so long.

"The sicko one? I don't think she used one on the letter. Just 'your daughter.' "

"No, I want the baby one, the apple of his eye."

"Oh. Urn .. . Padgett."

"You can spell that?"

"You can't? P-a-d-g-e-t-t. If they didn't get New Age Hollywood and change it to something like P-a-g-e-t."

Max hit a short riff of keys. "They didn't." He sounded pleased with himself. "Found a password area. Might contain some interesting stuff. You turn up anything?"

The CRT screen lit his face from below, highlighting the concentration lines etched deeply into his features. Computers were just another complicated cryptogram for Max to solve.

Temple liked to use computers, but she never went more than screen-deep into their mysteries.

Wait a minute! Max had never even met Darren Cooke. How did he know what the password would be?

Temple crouched there pouting a little at the patented Kinsella enigma: the windmills of his mind were always hidden within boxes within boxes. Sometimes the closer she got to Max, the farther she got from the real person.

He must have used logic to find the password, must have read articles on the tendency to choose family names. She knew a little more about Darren Cooke than he did. Maybe she could pull a rabbit out of a hat too. But what--? She shoved the Rolodex away. It was crammed with business cards, erratically filed. A manila folder would never fit there, anyway.

Max's irritating whistle signaled he had found something juicy onscreen and she was supposed to go over and gawk at it.

"What?" Temple asked, not moving.

"Doing business with insider traders, looks like. The IRS would love to break into this area. If the assistant were erasing anything--and more likely she was transferring it to floppy first and then erasing-- this is it."

Temple stared at the small, hard square disks piled beside the computer. "Why do they call them 'floppies,' anyway, when they're as hard as Mexican tiles?"

"Didn't used to be." Max looked up. "What's the matter? Couldn't find anything?"

Now he was reading her moods! Temple got up and wandered around the desk. She went to the bookcase and pulled out the books again, this time looking inside every one. Just computer manuals and reference books, the kind of things you'd expect to find in an office.

She frowned and looked down at the counter's littered surface. There was one thing you didn't expect to find in an office, especially Darren Cooke's office, since he was notoriously not the domestic type. A recipe box. But it was the right size for office index cards.

She opened the lid. Flower-decorated labels popped up above the level field of index cards like spring crocuses. "Appetizers. Main Courses. Hot Tamales. Pastries. Sugar-and-Spice.

Sweetmeats. Exotic Drinks."

Well, the exotic drinks probably fit in with his lifestyle, at least.

Temple suddenly clapped the box shut, as if it were Pandora's hope chest.

Max bolted up from the chair. "What is it? You heard something?"

"Yeah, my little gray cells turning pure silver and hitting pay dirt."

"All the secrets I'm finding on this computer are financial manipulations. What have you got?"

Now he was coming over to gawk at her find, and she didn't even know what she had. Just suspected.

Temple took the box to the desk lamp, set it down and opened it as if she expected a rattlesnake to pop out.

"Recipes?"

"Maybe."

She pulled out an index card behind the label "Sugar-and-Spice." A smaller white card was taped to its lined face, a handwritten "For my only darling!" scrawled across it. Underneath was hand-printed: "Miranda Cummings," then an address and phone number. And a notation: "A sultry dish with paprika hair and legs long enough to make an octopus jealous." And a date.

Temple pulled out another index card. This one had a business card affixed, but a similar coyly written summary.

"Cooke!" she said. "This is Darren Cooke's little black book! His wife must have found my card in here, not at the hotel room, as she said. I didn't think the police would have overlooked searching under the mattress." She looked up at Max. "That must have been an eerie task, his widow coming here to go through this box of. . . forbidden treats. And, look, the dates are sequential in each category--aha, three days before I was hit on... Dana, the nanny! His own daughter's nanny. Did that man have no sexual conscience?"