Douglas, Nelson - Cat in a Flamingo Fedora

Max took the box and began paging through. "Of course not. He was infamous for it."

"The nanny could have been the mousy miniskirted woman who visited Cooke's suite last week!"

"His wife?" Max wasn't really paying attention.

"No, the nanny."

"What category do you suppose you were under?"

"I don't know, maybe Appetizers.' Is there a section for food allergies?"

"Let's see what 'Desserts' is like."

"Let's not." Temple snatched for the box. "This is a lascivious little stockpile. It could be used to blackmail a lot of women."

"I know. It's always handy to have something on the rich and famous."

"It's not our business to read it. We'll have to turn it over to the police. Why do you suppose Michelle left this here?"

"Safer. Hardly anyone knew about the office. And she didn't want to make the personal assistant suspicious; just told her to transfer the computer financial records to those piled disks, checked the front of all the categories to see who was most recent on her husband's Hall of Fame recipe files and used your card to contact you."

"Why would he put me in here with all these pushovers? And when?"

"He could have come here Sunday between brunch and midnight."

"Why?"

"To look at his records. Maybe to meet someone in a discreet place."

"Maybe ... he liked to play games, and if you like to play games, you don't cheat at them.

Maybe he had my card along because he intended to contact me again, and whoever met him here didn't know and put me in the file."

"Someone who knew about it."

Temple nodded. "I figured it out." She eyed the dark office lit by the lone island of light. "But no manila envelope."

"That he'd put somewhere really secure, like a literal safe. His conquests were not a secret.

Nothing here. I checked the walls and floors when I first came in."

"That's why it seemed you were gone forever!"

"Maybe you just missed me."

She ignored that. "But the police checked with the Oasis front desk. Darren Cooke hadn't rented a safety-deposit box."

"Maybe not there. If he kept his black book at the office instead of in the bedroom, maybe he kept the letters in another hotel safe."

Temple nodded. "With all the hotels in town, it'd be like searching for one light bulb in a whole galaxy."

"Not necessarily. He couldn't resist the Cooke recipe box. It's a pun of sorts, it refers back to himself. You might think of someplace significant to him right now."

"Not right now. It's too late to think. What do we do? Leave the box?"

"We have to. But. .. there's a copier in the outer office."

"Copy the cards? There must be dozens and dozens. The machine will make a heck of a noise in this tombstone area at this time of night."

"We can lay out several to a page. We'll set up a system and it'll go fast." Max checked his glow-nvthe-dark watch face. "It's after one. Should only take half an hour or so. Then you won't have to worry about clues and evidence vanishing."

Temple nodded.

They hurried to the outer office and warmed up the machine, which made a telltale wheezing sound in operation.

"Wait!" Temple stopped Max from laying out the cards. "This machine has a reduce feature.

We can get more cards to a page that way." She adjusted the setup, then Max began dealing out index cards faster than the eye could see.

Temple pushed the copy button, kept the paper feeder full and stacked the finished pages.

They worked fast, with a sense that the activity might attract someone at any instant. The cards seemed endless, even copying eight to a page. Temple felt feverish. She felt l ike a robot stacking the copies. Max was a machine himself, slapping cards to the glass copier surface in supernaturally neat rows.

"Had a lot of practice at this," he said once.

It took forty minutes, but the recipe-box contents were copied and back in their categories, and Temple had a sheaf of something to take out of the break-in site.

"Copier off. Paper tray refilled to the previous level," she announced.

They both studied the outer office for anything out of place.

"No discards in the wastebasket." Temple nudged it with her foot.

"Lights out here, then." Max snapped off the outer-office desk lamp.

They edged their blind way to the inner office, where the box was replaced, the clutter was reinstituted, the laptop and desk chair replaced and the desk lamp turned off.

The flashlight flared at the same instant.

They edged through the rear storeroom and out the back door.

"Go to the car," Max said. "I'll reset the alarm."

Temple went, counting the moments until she was off the street, with her armload of white papers, and safe within the Taurus's dim interior ... which was still there, not stolen, hallelujah!

Temple scrunched down in the front seat, watching Max's dark figure fuss around the light-colored door. A car drove by on the main street. She hadn't dared slam her door shut, so she still felt vulnerable.

Any moment a bogeyman could spring out of the dark and jerk her door open ... A bogeyman filled the passenger-side window even now. Temple jumped. And then Max slid into the driver's seat, leaving his door unslammed, and stripped off his thin latex gloves.

"You can toss yours now too." He glanced at her hands clutching the papers on her lap.

The latex gloves still felt oddly creepy. They hit the floor as soon as she could yank them off.

The Taurus, once started, crept onto the better-lit main street. After a couple of turns and a few blocks, they entered Charleston Boulevard. More cars joined them. Soon they were merging with Strip traffic.

Max had been right, as he had been all too often lately. She was back at the Circle Ritz by 2

a.m.

Max parked beside her Storm.

"How's your book going?" she asked.

"A mess, but mine own, now that Gandolph's gone."

She nodded. Trying to organize a dead man's notes and computer files must be maddening.

"I could look at what you've got, divide it into sections."

"Maybe we can use index cards, like Cooke's recipe book?"

She laughed. So did Max, but then he sobered.

"I've used my international contacts to check on the psychics present at the seance when Gandolph died. Oscar Grant of Dead Zones and D'Arlene Hendrix made several trips to Russia and Eastern Europe before and after the Iron Curtain collapse, investigating psychic phenomena."

"Isn't that routine for them?"

"Possibly. But they could have encountered terrorist agents. Maybe someone offered tit for tat: kill Gandolph and get Russian trade secrets from their years of secret psychic research."

"You still think Gandolph was murdered?"

"I'm still not satisfied that he wasn't."

"And until then, you're not going to let it go?"

"Would you?"

"No, but it isn't personal for me."

"You were there. Don't you hate being hoodwinked?"

"Not as badly as a professional magician might." Temple smiled. "I guess I came through my first breaking and entering without any neurotic damage."

"You found something, which is more than I thought possible. And keep trying to think of where Cooke might have hidden those letters. They could be the key to his death."

"Another maybe-murder."

Max shrugged. "Life is not as neatly compartmentalized as Cooke's recipe box. Neither is love."

She looked at him.

It felt just like it had in Minneapolis when they had first started dating . . . what, almost two years before? Coming home to her apartment in a warm cocoon of car, the winter night as close as the frosty rolled-up windows and as far away as Mars.

People courted in cars in a northern state like Minnesota, risking carbon-monoxide poisoning. She remembered the engine idling in park, the heater blowing, the headlights off and the conversation not stopping because nobody wanted to open a car door and let in the cold.