Unknown - 23_Cat_In_A_Vegas_Gold_Vendetta

“I want to. I will.” Temple looked up to see that Jayden and Rowdy had gathered around Violet’s bed. Neither man could bear to leave the old woman alone with a visitor.

“You’re just dreaming about cats being gone, again, dear lady,” Jayden said. “Here’s some sweet chili and chamomile tea.” Jayden put the straw to Violet’s mouth, effectively shutting her up.

He may not want her talking to anyone, but he couldn’t stay on the premises all the time. Rowdy backed out of Violet’s eyesight.

“She really doesn’t care to see me,” he whispered to Temple. “That phony bastard turns her against everyone, but she had a head start with me anyway. I’ve done the cat-litter straining and buried the evidence.”

“You do it daily?”

“Once a day, like Pedro. Violet kinda cottons to you, that’s why Jayden moves in so fast. I guess you remind her of something good.”

“Alexandra?” Temple asked the former boyfriend.

“Aw, naw. You’re a different type, nothing personal. Alexandra was, ah, more statuesque? ‘Built’ would be the word. And blond hair like on a Christmas angel. Yeah. I didn’t know what a looker like that saw in me too.” He glanced at the bed. “’Cept I didn’t have ‘expectations,’ like her old lady. Funny. They were awfully alike, but they didn’t know it. Perfectionists, you could say.”

“Thanks, Rowdy,” Freddie stepped in to say, muscling Temple away from Violet’s bed and toward the entry hall where they wouldn’t be overheard. “Now, you seem to be someone Violet can trust. No relation. Never knew her before … what—?”

“Yesterday,” Temple said.

“And you’re only here because…”

“My, uh, friend was worried about her aunt.”

Temple knew she couldn’t say, “I’m Temple Barr, PR” and expect to be taken seriously. But when Temple thought about it, she’d been schooled in criminal surveillance by a master counterterrorist and in shrinkology by a vocational expert. Plus, she was a pretty shrewd judge of people herself. Freddie, she was sure, was a smooth operator.

“Well, your friend should be worried about Violet,” Freddie said, bending to whisper in Temple’s ear. “This house is pretty old and needs updating, but the land could be cleared and worth something nowadays.”

“What about it backing onto the flood-control area where Pedro died?”

“I’m licensed to sell real estate, among other things. You never mention anything dying anywhere near a property, except maybe coyotes, and you’re okay. I hate to say it, but ole Violet is a sitting duck, and it’s hard to figure who’s gathering round for her own good and who’s hoping to profit big-time.”

“You have a seriously pessimistic view of human nature,” Temple said.

“And I shouldn’t have?”

“What do you think Violet is worth with your name on the will?”

Freddie shrugged. “I can’t talk her into any sense. I told her long ago to leave it all to an animal shelter, but there are so many she can’t make up her mind now that she’s ill and confused. That leaves everything she is and has to who wants it worst.”

“How horrible.”

“You got your will made, Miss Just-Wants-To-Help?”

“Ah, no.” Temple was going to say she was about to turn only thirty-one, but Violet had probably been saying that for forty years. Suddenly, one day you realize you’re not immortal and that you’re unprepared for defending what you most care about.

“Do you like cats?” she asked the repellent but logical Freddie.

The woman shook her ridiculously dyed head. “Not a bit. Whatcha gonna do about it?”

Temple turned to look at Jayden, who was singsonging Violet into a trance, and Rowdy, who’d retreated to the kitchen arch to sling a huge bag of cat kibble into bowls he’d fill only as long as Violet lived and his duty to dead Alexandra was over.

Temple had been here just twice, but even she noticed that the cat population was reduced from her first visit.

“My baby is missing,” came the weak keening from the bed.

Was Violet cognizant enough to know the awful truth, or was she speaking about her dead daughter?

Temple was just investigator enough to know she was dealing with an impossible situation. She was a stranger who couldn’t urge Violet to end this impasse and name an heir, and meanwhile people who could be up to God knew what for God knew what reasons were freely coming and going to and from her house in the name of tending the sick.

“What about Violet’s day helper?” Temple asked the savvy Freddie.

“Yolanda comes in early and does her best to keep the living areas litter-dust and cat-hair free, as she has for years.”

“What kind of relationship did she have with Pedro?”

Freddie’s already soaring red-penciled eyebrows almost hit her hairline. “Yolanda has a husband and three adult children. No hotsy-totsy potential there.”

“Is she in the will?”

“Violet has left five or so thousand here and there, not to her relatives, I know that.”

“What about you?”

“Oh,” Freddie said, shaking her extremely coifed head, “we used to be great friends, but we had a falling out. That’s the way it was with Violet. Like Alexandra, you find it’s got to be her way or the freeway. She was just too demanding that Alex stay her mother’s little girl. Even her niece Sue Anna came up a caricature of a girl-woman, caught up in looking like a supermodel, just like these kids today are all little Britneys and Lindsays, no matter how whacked those child stars grow up. That’s why Violet’s taken to you. You’re just a little doll.”

“I resent that,” Temple said. “Height I don’t have, and female I am, but I’m nobody’s ‘little doll.’”

“I’m just saying that Violet wanted to confine Alexandra in a box, always young and beautiful and shallow as ditch water, although she was smarter than anybody thought.”

“You don’t approve of a thing in Violet’s life, down to these cats.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Yet you’re here now.”

She glanced to the bed, with Jayden hanging over it. “Violet always had a flaky streak. Mediums and magnets and New Age chicanery. It’s sad to see her weaknesses instead of her strengths ruling her last days. Like this infestation of cats. The home health nurses who stop in to monitor vital signs and change the bedpans have a fit about the unsanitary conditions, but it’s a free country, as long as you can remain sane enough to declare your wishes, and Violet won’t leave her house until she’s carried out of it.”

“You know something about the will,” she told Freddie. “Does she leave the bulk of her estate to whomever cares for her cats?”

“Not a few years ago, when we were still buddies.”

“She could have added that provision in a codicil more recently.”

“And some scam artist could know more about that than I would,” Freddie said, throwing Jayden a poison-pen look with a jerk of her head.

“Whoever inherits, I hope to get the job of selling the house,” she went on. “It will be quite a challenge clearing out all the clutter, and that stuff will be the first thing to go. I’m betting that, despite Violet’s violent wishes otherwise, whoever inherits, the second things to go will be the cats.”

Temple stared into Freddie LaCosta’s sun-damaged features and understood that she too was one of Violet’s worst enemies.

These days, who wasn’t?

Chapter 18

Unlikely Bedfellows

I am ambling through the Circle Ritz parking lot now that Miss Temple and her Miata are off on errands of an investigative nature on the hot and seamy side of town.

I am heading for my favorite oleander bush, shade in Las Vegas being a rare and beautiful thing. I am expecting peace and quiet now that my recently discovered maternal parent, Ma Barker, and her feral clowder have pulled up stakes (rather like vampire slayers) and relocated to the nearby police substation, where they can get all the fast food the folks in desert beige can share with the homeless of one stripe or another.