Unknown - 19_Cat_In_A_Red_Hot_Rage

“Okay, kiddo,” I say, knowing Louise hungers for acknowledgment as a relative of mine. “Tell me what you have learned on your little foray.”

Does she bend my ear! And whiskers.

I must admit that I am impressed. Wait! I do not have to admit it, and I do not. I just simply let her spill her guts, as girls will, and will figure out later if she is just dreaming or is really on to something.

It turns out the other half of Midnight Inc. Investigations is allhot and bothered by a whole lot of things I thought only I had discovered and was not worried about. Like, as we have discussed, the fact that the Neon Nightmare club is built like a pyramid-shaped hunk of Swiss cheese, with more hidden rooms and shafts than a pharaoh’s funeral home in the Egyptian desert.

It makes sense. Las Vegas sits in the middle of the Mojave Desert. A lot of folks died here during the mob wars long ago. Bodies and treasure are buried in these forgotten sands of time.

And … those secret areas were not just so the Phantom Mage could rappel down on bungee cords nightly. There are rooms occupied by a hidden coven of magicians with ambi-tions.

Maybe the kit is right. Maybe Midnight Louie had better take a break from murder one at the Red Hat Sisterhood convention and ankle on over to the Neon Nightmare tonight to see what Mr. Max’s former confreres are up to now that the Phantom Mage is MIA too.

Chapter 19

Ding-Dong Daddy

Temple had convinced herself that letting Electra return to the literal scene of the crime was a good idea. An innocent woman would hold her head and hat up, and carry on.

And Detective Alch was okay with it. Simply finding a body was not a crime.

Of course all traces of the late Oleta Lark were gone, conveyed to the Las Vegas coroner. Still, Temple could tell from the subdued note of the lobby chatter that the news of her death was getting around, and hung like a purple-haze pall over the pre-opening activities.

It was most evident in the sidelong glances Electra attracted, even when surrounded by her welcoming Red-Hatted League chapter members. Noticing Detective Su cruisingnearby, it occurred to Temple that the police had okayed Electra’s return because they wanted to watch her, and the reaction of everyone else to her. If so, she was letting Electra play right into their hands. Great! Temple believed in supporting her local police, but not in railroading her landlady for murder!

“Electra! You look great,” Alice squealed, the first to spot their missing member. “We are on the trail around here like bloodhounds.” Alice brushed back the bill of her purple-andred-checked deerstalker.

That assertion made Electra blink.

“Well,” Phyll added, “bloodhounds are officially red, aren’t they?”

Temple was glad to leave Electra in the friendly custody of her gal pals and be about her PR person’s business, which was to clear the Crystal Phoenix of any taint, as well as firmly affix the murder rap on anyone other than Electra.

She still had to wear the cursed Pink Albatross (its brim span must have been as wide as that doom-bearing seabird’s wingspan) to pass unchallenged in these main hotel areas now declared the Queendom of Hattitude.

As an unofficial “squirt,” Temple felt like a tugboat cruising among a port thronged with ships of the line. Most of the women were taller and broader than she, so Temple sometimes felt like a child lost at a fairgrounds.

The fact that so many women of a certain age had attained a certain comfortable and even powerful size made Temple realize how easy it would be for one to commit a tidy job of strangulation.

Once the victim’s throat was encompassed, it would surely only be a matter of ruthless compression, of indifference on a murderous scale.

People often threatened to “wring” someone’s neck, but how many could follow through on such a vow for the two minutes or so that it took for the action to complete the impulse?

Not her!

She heard a distant mutter like the cooing of pigeons. Standing on tippy toes on her vintage Beverly Feldman spikes, Templespotted a male presence cleaving the crowd of red and purple furbelows.

So far only Aldo Fontana had managed that honor. This guy was as tall, but that was because he wore a hat in the sea of hats. A fawn-colored ten-gallon cowboy hat.

When Temple was able to glimpse the whole man, she saw he was tall but lean in that ready-to-blow-away mode of old cowboys.

His sun-leathered face was cadaverous, with a long, prominent jaw. His jeans were so weather-washed they looked designer-fashionable and his belt buckle was almost as big as his hat.

Of course, Temple was not the only one to have spotted this out-of-place person.

An agitation of red hats surrounded this iconic Western figure.

Then came a shriek.

Weathered Cowboy Guy turned in that direction, then shouted out, “Puddin’ Puss! Is that you?”

Another shriek.

Temple clawed her way through the crowds to the scene of unseemly behavior.

The Red-Hatted League was at the center of it, forming an honor guard around Electra, who had plucked a four-inch-long hat pin out of her double-wide red chapeau and was aiming it at the Stranger in Town.

“Elmore Lark,” she said, “you stay away from me.”

Temple jerked her head back to the guy. This was Electra’s third husband, the bigamist? Well, he was big. Tall, anyway.

“Now, Puddin’ Puss, calm down. I’m jest here to hear what happened to my Pearly Poochie.”

Temple was starting to think Elmore Lark would shortly be found strangled by a pet leash.

“Cain’t we jest talk?” he asked.

“If we had ‘jest talked,’ Elmore Lark,” Electra retorted, sheathing her hat pin in red felt with the panache of a Musketeer, “I would have had a lot happier life.”

“But no darlin’ baby boy Curtiss,” he said with a grin.

Electra grimaced. “And when did you last have contact with your son?”

Elmore shrugged. “A while. Boy needs his mother. A daddy’s jest a ding-dong bother.”

“Well, you were,” Electra said. “You really think I’m gonna sit down meekly and talk to you after all you did, and didn’t do, years ago?”

“Waal, no, Puddin’ Puss. Except I may be the only man in the state of Nevada who jest knows you didn’t do in Miss Pearly Poochie.”

He raised bushy gray eyebrows. “Whatayah say? I came down here to give you an alibi.”

This Temple had to hear. She elbowed her way through a cotton-knit cloud of purple tops to take Electra’s elbow and turn to Elmore Lark.

“The hotel has made an interview room available. Let’s go there. Follow me.”

“Now who are you, Little Lady?” Elmore asked.

“Your worst nightmare or your best chance. Follow me.”

“Yessum. I’d follow your behind anytime anywhere, Little Doggie.”

Electra managed to elbow him, hard, in the bony ribs, while she scampered ahead to catch up with Temple.

“You really want to talk to this scum, Temple dear?” she whispered.

“I’ll talk to anyone who knew the dead woman and might have had a motive to get her that way. He’s the man in the middle, Electra, and they make good witnesses, or suspects. Can you can the vitriol, however deserved, for a while?”

“For you, sure. Besides, I want to watch this worm squirm.”

Hotel conference rooms are depressingly similar: large central wood-grain table surrounded by huge, heavy, impossible-tomove leather chairs. A table along one wall usually holds coffee and hot water urns, foam cups, plastic stirring straws, fake sugar, and fake creamer.

This was the Crystal Phoenix, though, Las Vegas’s classiest hotel long before the Bellagio, Paris, Venetian, and Wynn went arty and upscale.