Unknown - 19_Cat_In_A_Red_Hot_Rage

“You don’t want to mention that ‘grandma’ part in this crowd. Trust me.”

Eduardo shrugged. “I’m off in two hours. Ralph can watch his own butt.”

Temple sighed. She was sure Eduardo meant that last comment literally. Still, good help was hard to find at a major national convention, and she needed nonpolice sources. Her entrance evoked a round of applause.

“Have we got ‘mail,’ ” Alice said.

“E-mail,” Phyll added. “Yup. That stuff never goes away on the Internet, if you know where to look.”

At the moment, Phyll looked like an extremely smug purple and redheaded nuthatch.

Temple sat down, ready to take copious notes.

“Here’s the deal,” Judy said. ” ‘The Black Hat Brotherhood’ isn’t just some macho group that just sprang up. Two of its founders are disgruntled Red Hat Sisterhood ex-spouses.”

“Elmore?”

Judy nodded.

“So you’re saying that some of the women here might be murderers?”

“You do not get it, Little Pink.”

Temple took umbrage. To them, she was not only small, she was young and green. And pink!

“This stuff is not just sixties’ generation carping,” Phyll added. “It digs down deep. The Red Hat Sisterhood is fairly new on the scene, only a few years old.”

“But the reason for its existence is eternal,” Judy said, portentously.

Always look for a librarian to be portentous. They’d earned it. They knew what everybody else had forgotten. Temple had never thought of librarians as pit bulls with bifocals before.

But the incriminating information Judy and Phyll had dug up in a few short hours was amazing. They’d returned with reams of printouts cradled on the crooks of their arms like freshly printed thousand-dollar bills.

“There’s that much hard info out there on our victims and suspects?” she asked.

“There’s that much information out there on you and me,” Phyll said. “Hey, don’t hyperventilate, Temple. Just kidding. A lot of this stuff is bits and pieces of Oleta’s unpublished memoirs.”

“That looks like more than enough to publish,” Temple observed as the papers hit the conference tabletop. She’d usually only heard papers make such a substantial “smack” when heaving the Sunday New York Times to her coffee table top … when Max had gotten one as preface to a lazy day of reading in bed.

The memory saddened her. An engaged girl with puzzles to solve shouldn’t be sad. Temple picked up the top page and started skimming. It was a digest printout. Oleta’s e-mail address had been steamedfemme4311@hotmail.com. That significant numeral made it scary to contemplate how many mad, mad, mad madwomen were out there.

The weird part was that being a woman scorned had come to Oleta after she had made Electra into one. Didn’t Oleta and women like her understand that you reap what you sow? What goes around comes around? Though men certainly didn’t seem to get that, either.

Temple sat down slowly, reading.

This was disastrous. The current segment described Electra as a vengeful harpy, aching to get into a literal catfight with the tender young innocent that Oleta portrayed herself ashaving been. Her memoirs made a strong case for Elmore needing to use any means to escape the Electra Oleta portrayed, even to marrying another woman without the formality of a divorce.

Women who made a habit of poaching other women’s men often made the cast-off wife the villain. Until it was their turn. “It doesn’t look good for Electra,” Alice agreed, reading silently over Temple’s shoulder. “It’s almost as if Oleta had planted a motive for Electra in these e-mails.”

“ ‘Almost as if,’ heck no! That’s exactly what she did.” Temple stood up, excited. “What if the wrong victim died? What if Oleta had always intended to kill Elmore here, and blame Electra for it? If the widely distributed ‘peeks’ at her memoirs were a setup?”

“That would be pretty fiendish,” Phyll said.

“But perfect. She mentions Elmore as resenting her Red Hat Sisterhood activities and book project. And he must have been a member of the Black Hat Brotherhood for some time. Why? Ironically, maybe he was going to kill her after she left him? Maybe did? She could have known that the Black Hats would be here protesting this convention, and she knew Electra lived in Las Vegas.”

“How’d she know that?” asked Judy.

“Electra runs the Lovers’ Knot Wedding Chapel. Those chapels are always making the news. Bretangelo, pop stars Bret Aspen and Laura D’Angelo, got married at her chapel just a couple months ago. That generated press all over the country.”

“Isn’t a ‘tangelo’ a hybrid fruit?” Alice wondered.

“There have been rumors about her,” Starla said darkly. “That mango-blond hair job!”

“Aren’t they divorced already?” Judy asked.

“Well, yeah,” Temple said. “Stars marry and adopt and divorce at the drop of a scandal sheet these days. Las Vegas and Reno are conveniently close for both ends of the cycle. I hope those babes keep the third-world kids longer than they keep the Rodeo Drive

husbands.”

Red-hatted heads shook in agreement and sorrow at what the world of international celebrity had come to.

“Elmore Lark was attacked too. But why after Oleta,” Judy objected.

Temple thought. “His illness sure could be an attack. Maybe he was meant to die first? Maybe the method, whatever it was, had been set in motion. Poison, say. It had to be that if he hasn’t just suffered a stroke or heart attack. Poison is a murder method with a very forgiving timeline.”

“How? Oleta couldn’t foresee the debate?”

“Maybe the method that made him collapse had nothing to do with the debate.”

“Or the water pitcher. That would get your significant other off the hook.”

For a second, Temple assumed that Phyll was referring to Max. He sure was habit-forming when it came to scrapes and schemes.

But, no, her SO now was Matt, and she herself had managed to get him involved in a possible attempted murder case.

‘Does this look like a real book?” she asked Judy of the printouts. “Or just random parts?”

“Hard to tell. It does dwell a lot on her meeting Elmore thirty years ago and winning him away from Electra. ‘Weaning’ was the way she put it.”

“Ugh,” Temple said. ” ‘Weaning’ a man off his wife. Makes you wonder why she lasted as long among the living as she did.”

“Anyway, it’s hard to tell whether she was accentuating the negative because she was now bitter and alone, or because she wanted to spill everything and make things hot for Elmore.”

“It’s hard to believe a legitimate publisher would be that interested in a sad old tale like that. Can you find out how real a deal Oleta Lark had for this so-called memoir?”

“Hey,” Phyll said. “If the truth is out there on the Worldwide Web, a librarian can find it.”

“I’m not so sure—” Temple began when Judy jumped in.

“The ordinary author wouldn’t spread all that material free over the Web, you’d think.”

“That’s the smart way to market these days,” Alice objected. “Tease ‘em with a free sample, hopefully scandalous, on the Web. That’s how you build buzz.”

Temple nodded. “And if you were out to slander someone, that’d be the perfect way to start. Oleta seems to have been a pretty vengeful person.”

“She writes a lot,” Starla added, “about finding salvation and self-esteem through the Red Hat Sisterhood. The title is Confessions of a Randy Red Hat Woman.”

Temple the PR maven bristled at that. “That title wasn’t going to sit well with the organization and most members. Talk about a million motives for murder.”