Unknown - 19_Cat_In_A_Red_Hot_Rage

“Orson who?”

“He was a boy genius, a noted gourmand, writer, and film director. But he’s dead now, of course.”

“I thought you said his first name was Orson?” Dolly blinked her fuzzy lashes.

“I did.”

“Now you’re saying it was `Ormand’? Isn’t that French?”

Ormand Welles. Well, it had a Las Vegas ring to it.

Ring. She thought of Max’s little emerald one tucked into her scarf drawer now that she was otherwise “engaged,” and the gorgeous one she’d forced Matt to hide in a floor safe because she wasn’t ready to come out as his fiancé.

Maybe now was the time to “ring” in the new, “ring” out the old. Max was gone. Only her memories of Max in this house remained.

It was as if a brutal hand had erased everything here in the most hurtful, sweeping way to make her face the facts, and the present, not the past.

Nothing here to cling to, but regret. She sipped the drink Aldo had made while he “allowed” Dolly French to take him on a guided tour of the house. Temple kept staring at the Sub-Zero refrigerator like the Abominable Snowman it was: a lurkingvision in a mist, once an old friend, but now mostly an old and fading legend.

“Max, wherefore are thou, Max?”

He had appeared in her life in another place at another time like an answer to a dream. Now the dream had ended, and Max was gone. All trace of him. The perfect exit for a magician.

Maybe she’d better get used to life without everyday magic. Maybe she’d better concentrate on making sure Electra didn’t face a nightmare of her own too real to write off.

Chapter 16

Electra’s Larks

The Circle Ritz penthouse where Electra lived and presided always felt like it was off-limits, even when you were expected.

Temple had only been up here a few times, so she knocked gingerly on the door, then rang the doorbell right after that, convinced that her petite knuckles wouldn’t rouse a flea.

The door jerked open to reveal Electra back to wearing her usual wildly floral muumuu.

“What’s happening at the convention?” she asked.

“Not much:’ Temple said. “There’s more going on in that hot jungle print you’re wearing.”

“I don’t feel up to wearing imperial purple at the moment. But you look pretty in pink. You never used to wear that color.”

“I wasn’t planning on masquerading as a Pink Hatter before, and it never went with my natural red hair color.”

“It goes great with your new blond do. Come in, dear.”

Electra’s entry hall was a hexagonal affair lined in mirrored blinds, so multiple muumuus greeted Temple’s eyes. Also multiples of her still foreign-looking blond self.

Maybe if she dyed her hair back to its natural red shade, she’d find Max. That was superstitious thinking, but desperate people turn to symbolic notions.

Temple passed herself coming and going in the mirrored blind slats. Now that she was clad in Pink Lady hues she looked as nauseatingly sweet as a tropical drink to a beer buff.

Electra’s living room was the usual dim and mysterious, not to mention occupied by hulking pieces of forties-vintage furniture.

Temple loved vintage, but one had to draw the line somewhere, and for her, oversize forties jungle florals in shades of forest-green and chartreuse were it.

She sat gingerly on the only floral-free chair in the room, a plain maroon mohair lounge chair. Mohair was a stiff, buzz-cut wool texture as welcoming to the epidermis as falling into a native stake pit.

Electra sat with a grateful “oof ” on the long lumbering sofa hunched against the wall. Lights were dim here, but a green glint caromed off the huge glass ball sitting atop the vintage blond-wood TV set. A pair of small, eerie red lights blinked like Christmas bulbs at Electra’s ankles.

Since this was firmly spring, as much as Las Vegas ever admitted to such a pleasant, moderate season, Temple assumed the red lights were the reflective eyes of Electra’s psychotically shy cat, Karma, the mystic Birman.

Come to think of it, the atmosphere up here was thick enough to slice with a chain saw. Electra might very well be a Las Vegas strangler with a gender-bending mission … Instead of the literal lady-killer Bluebeard, she could be a blue-haired lady killer of husbands.

“Did you get the family tree written down?”

“I tried, but I just can’t concentrate enough right now. Finding a dead woman, even if she turned out to be someone I had no sympathy for, is very discombobulating.”

Temple picked up the notepad and pen that Electra had only managed to doodle on.

“Okay. We’ll do this as an interview. You said you had five husbands.” Temple asked, pen poised, “Where are they all now?”

“Goodness, dear, I don’t know! What’s the point of leaving them if they’re still on your Christmas card list?”

“You must have known Elmore and Oleta were in Reno, though.”

“Nope.” Electra gazed at the green globe over the dead TV as the red lights danced at her ankle level. “He was easy to forget.”

“I imagine most of them were, from what you said, but I need to know the who, where, and when on all of them.”

“Not the why, though?”

“No. That would be prying,” Temple said demurely, as befitted a Pink Lady.

As soon as she got through with this convention she was going to ditch this ditzy hat for something red, even if it was a wig the color of her real hair.

“I’m glad you’re leaving something for me to have and to hold,” Electra said dryly. “Just how serious do you think this being under suspicion is for me?”

“Very. It turns out your next Mrs. Lark was writing a memoir and mailing bits and pieces all over the Internet.”

“What would Oleta have to write about? Elmore was dull, dull, dull.”

“Not according to one tidbit gleaned from Oleta’s compulsive Internet confessions, or maybe it was just canny book promotion: she said her long ‘marriage’ ended when she was abandoned in a ghost town in Nevada by a bigamist.”

“Bigamist!” Electra jumped up as the little Rudolph-red noses at her ankles vanished under the sofa’s swaying cocoa-colored fringe.

Her shock reassured Temple. She hadn’t heard it from Oleta, then.

Electra was still in angry orbit. “Oleta is saying that bastard didn’t really divorce me? Where is he? I’ll kill him now if she didn’t do the job first before coming here.”

“Am I glad this is just between us and the fire-eyed feline under the couch, because murder suspects must never threaten to slay new victims in public. Unless you’re a third-world dictator. Are you?”

“Of course not? What are you getting at?”

“The fact is, I don’t really know anything about your private life. When a murder happens, no life in the vicinity is private anymore. In this case, especially yours.”

Electra sat again in the dimness. Her sigh almost stirred the dark floral draperies at the doors to her patio.

“Well, darn, Temple. I came here to forget all about my past life. It wasn’t that successful.”

“But you’re an entrepreneur. You own and operate this building and the attached Lovers’ Knot Wedding Chapel. You’ve got energy, singular style, and tenants who adore you.”

“Really, you guys adore me?”

“What’s not to adore? You’re patient, creative, fun, and always listen. You’re our dorm mother.”

“ ‘Dorm mother.’ I like that.” Electra’s hands curled together on her chest.

Temple realized for the first time that she’d never seen any rings, nary a one, on those busy, plump fingers. And here was Temple with a seriously significant ring she wasn’t quite ready to flash, like a novice stripper with a Gstring and no nerve to wear it. At least Temple had a couple thoroughly painful thong panties in her lingerie drawer.