Unknown - 19_Cat_In_A_Red_Hot_Rage

“You’re the Fontana who owns the Viper,” she finally said to make talk.

“No, this is the, er, Family car.”

“How do you arrange who drives it when’?”

“Not the car, the model.”

“You mean you all drive Vipers?”

“All but Nicky. He’s a family man now. He drives a Land Rover.” Aldo made a face that screamed “canned ravioli.”

“The Fontana brothers run a fleet of Vipers? Isn’t that a bit”—she hated to use this word with a Fontana, just in case it really applied—“overkill?”

“Not at all. It gives us an instantly recognizable presence in the community. Sometimes you want people to see you coming and … sometimes you don’t. Then we drive Saturns.”

Awesome. She’d never thought of the Fontana brothers as “Enforcement R Us.”

“Besides,” Aldo said, the gold hinges of his designer sunglasses glinting as he turned the car onto Max’s street, “the ladies like it. This the place?”

“Almost.”

Temple clutched her tote bag. Max would kill her for leadinga Fontana brother here, leading anyone here. Then again, maybe she’d get him killed by coming here now.

What made her think that, other than insane worry?

Aldo was not impressed by the surroundings. “Jeez-Luisa, this neighborhood doesn’t look like it needs to be kept secret. It looks like an accountant lived here.” He eyed Temple over his glasses frames. “Your accountant. Not our accountant.”

“I don’t have an accountant,” she answered. And maybe she didn’t have an ex-boyfriend either.

Aldo walked around the parked car and bent to spring Templefrom the black leather passenger seat. This was a car that would fry you alive in Las Vegas, but apparently Aldo kept the air-conditioning blasting as much as the multispeaker sound system that had been blaring Italian opera all the way. One more sorrowful aria from Pagliacci or Pavarotti and Temple would strangle the nearest tenor.

Aldo followed her clicking heels up the familiar sidewalk. “No uncollected milk bottles on the doorstep:’ he mentioned. “Nobody delivers milk anymore.”

“That’s my point. So why is that black cat lurking in the Hollywood twist, then?” Aldo, well, pointed.

“Louie!” Temple gasped, glimpsing a dark feline face in the door-side plantings.

Except it wasn’t Louie, but a fluffier, younger version of Louie. The gold eyes gave it away.

“Looks like the black cat that hangs out at the Crystal Phoenix,” Aldo said. “Of course, all black cats look alike.” As if Fontana brothers didn’t?

“Maybe it’s an omen,” Temple said.

“Aw, MissTemple. Tell me you’re not superstitious?”

Aldo escorted her by the elbow up the rest of the walk.

“Watch it!” He seized her to a stop. “There’s a crack. You don’t wanna break your mama’s back. Especially my mama’s back. Any more than you wanna shave her mustache.” He glanced at her dumbstruck face. “Just kidding. Trying to jolly you up. You are getting grimmer than a grandma at a mob funeral these days.”

Lord, she wasn’t even a peri-menopausal woman and here was a man comparing her to his grandma! Kit had been right: all downhill from thirty. Except for the Red Hat ladies and her red hot aunt.

“So,” Aldo asked, standing in front of Max’s ultra-secure door like the pale ghost of Fuller Brush salesman from the days when housewives were at home and hucksters went from door to door instead of unsolicited e-mail to e-mail. “This is where the Mystifying Max hides out. He had the coolest disappearing onstage act in town.”

Temple quailed at that “had,” but rang the doorbell.

Need any red-feather dusters here? Beat-up Purple Hearts still beating? A memory-erasing vacuum that really doesn’t work very well? All returns guaranteed.

But nothing happened, which was a huge relief to Temple. The house was unoccupied. Quiet. Empty. The way Max had designed it to be seen forever. A movie-set facade that only the initiated could see behind.

Temple was sure she wasn’t the initiated anymore. And then the faceless front door opened.

“Yes? You did read the NO SOLICITING sign out front?” Temple was speechless.

Speechless.

“So sorry, miss,” Aldo said in whipped-cream-on-cappuccino tones. “We were seeking the previous resident.”

“I have no idea who that was, handsome. The Realtor found me this perfect place and the price was so very right that I couldn’t refuse.”

Temple had used Aldo’s charm time to survey the apparent new owner: a leggy brunette about six feet tall with a dangerously curved figure that screamed “showgirl.” She was not only stunned, but madly jealous. Go figure.

“Ah,” Temple managed. “So you’ve only been here—”

“A week, sweets. I got this place at a bargain bistro price, and wasn’t gonna waste time taking possession before somebody recovered their sanity.”

“Was the previous owner … was the furniture—?”

“Clean as Whistler’s mother.”

“No … equipment in the extra bedroom?”

“No, I brought my own home gym.”

Temple had been thinking of Gandolph the Great’s and Max’s retired magic props. “No opium bed in the north bedroom?”

“Hey, I don’t do anything heavier than Starbucks, sweetie. You want to come in and sit a bit? You look a lot green around the gills.”

“That would be very nice.” Aldo grabbed Temple’s elbow and swept them both inside, understanding that any peek inside would be insightful. “Miss, uh—?”

“French. Dolly French.”

Oh, please! Temple thought. PseudonymCity in a city made for phony monikers.

The woman batted her double-wide false eyelashes at Aldo. “And you and your lady friend?”

“Aldo Fontana, at your service, Miss French.” He somehow made “French” sound mildly obscene, which of course the rest of the world had been doing for centuries. “Miss Temple Barr is an employee of my”—Aldo cleared his throat like an operatic baritone—“Family.”

“Say, I’ve heard of you Fontana brothers. Want a drink?

Your brother’s employee looks like she could use one.”

“That would be delightful. Would you permit me to mix it?”

“I’d permit you to do a lot of things.”

While this B-movie dialogue was unrolling, Temple’d had time to eye the premises. Oh, man! Oh, Max! Everything was gone. Every bit of furniture or wall decor that she knew. Even the super-security touches, like metal interior shutters, were only a dream in Temple’s head.

She toddled after Aldo into the kitchen, which was the whole point in him playing bartender: seeing more of the house.

The stainless-steel appliances and countertops were the same, but the high stools were a whole different breed and the stone floor now echoed to Dolly French’s stilettos stomping around on them.

“You in the entertainment biz, sweetie?”

“No, public relations.”

Dolly stopped on a dime, holding three footed glasses expertly in one long-clawed hand and a bottle of vodka in the other.

“Not that kind of public relations,” Temple said through her teeth. “I represent the Crystal Phoenix hotel’s publicity and promotional interests.”

It was all some ghastly nightmare. A familiar place taken over by unfamiliar things and people. How could what Orson Welles, Garry Randolph, aka Gandolph the Great, and Max Kinsella had created here become so quickly a staging area for a stereotypical Las Vegas woman of iffy morals?

Aldo, as cool as Italian … gelato, was making some sort of stirred not shaken martini and trying to catch Temple’s eye with sympathy, and caution.

“Did you know,” Temple heard herself saying, “that this house originally belonged to Orson Welles?”