Unknown - 19_Cat_In_A_Red_Hot_Rage

“Temple, dear,” said a well-known voice. “I’m in such a pickle and I really need your help.”

“Electra?” Temple sat up straight, jolted out of her meditations. Trouble would take her mind off a lot of personal issues. “I can run right up to the penthouse.““Don’t, dear. I’m not there.”

The landlady of the Circle Ritz was always somewhere about the place. When not in her fifth-floor penthouse digs she was running the Lovers’ Knot Wedding Chapel with Drive-by Window—Photo Shoots free—at the side of the condominium-cum-apartment building. Everything here did double duty, including the angst.

“Electra! Where are you? What’s going on?”

“I’m at the Crystal Phoenix.”

“You have good taste.”

“Not really, dear. I have never been guilty of that. But I’m afraid I may be found guilty of something else.”

“Guilty? Of what?”

“I volunteered for security for this damn convention, Temple, dear. I thought I had picked up a thing or two from you and Max. Alas, apparently not. They’re planning on taking me in.”

“In where?”

“To stir, as we say in the security trade. Somewhere downtown, as they always say on TV. Can you come bail me out?”

“Yes! But, Electra, why?”

“They say I knocked off a Pink Lady.”

“I’ve been known to knock back a Pink Lady or two in my day too.”

“Not the drink, dear. A live one. Now dead. Please come! This Detective Su is very small, smart, and stem, and my using your name is having no effect whatsoever.”

The call ended on that alarming note.

Temple grabbed her cell phone and auto-dialed Max’s number one more time, just in case. No answer. “I’m leaving the Circle Ritz and heading for the Crystal Phoenix,” she told the messaging function. “You can catch up with me there. Electra’s in big trouble.”

Maybe that cryptic message would draw Max out of his disappearing act.

She threw the cell phone in her tote bag, pushed her bare feet into the Steve Madden slides under the coffee table, blew Louie a good-bye kiss, and skidded out the door.

Electra? In trouble with the law? Impossible!

Chapter 4

Mr. Know-It-All

Once my framed roomie has done her little-doll skidoo, I gaze sadly at the morning paper, which she has neglected to read, given the enthralling appearance of Mr. Matt Devine on her doorstep … and in her scarf drawer.

A dude of my age, position, and gravitas is above peeking in on bedroom antics, but I did hear mention of their late archenemy, and therefore mine, Miss Kathleen O’Connor. I could tell MissTemple exactly when and where she acquired the sinister ring Mr. Matt took away, quite rightly.

It is not that I could talk, if I wanted to, though I like to think I can do anything. But it is also against my principles to talk to humans. Besides, that would be spoiling my MissTemple’s fun. She does love a mystery.

So do I.

I am eager to follow her over to the Crystal Phoenix and find out what our beloved landlady is up to.

But first I ponder the newspaper. Those of my ilk are hopelessly drawn to paper products. Maybe it is the heady aroma of fresh ink. Maybe it is because we are smarter than we let on, and can read quite well if we apply ourselves and the seats of our pants to it. Pantaloons, I should say, in our case. We have bibs, we have ruffs, we have pantaloons and feathering. You would think we were cavalier poets.

Maybe it is because we are like those men I’ve heard talk of, who feel most wanted when they interrupt their women at some absorbing minor task and sweep them away to the bedroom, or the living room carpet.

The French do not worry about these things, but simply say, “Je ne sais quoi.” I know not what. Those French! Quite the cards.

Me, I worry about the bigger picture.

Sometimes I am the only one who sees it, and that is when I worry most.

I lean forward to regard the small news story below the fold on that morning’s front page.

NEON NIGHTMAREMAGICIAN-ACROBATFALLS TO DEATH, it reads.

The “jump” is on page 4. Ouch! Most unfortunate terminology in this case. “Terminology.” Ouch!

Now only I know why Mr. Max Kinsella is not answering his cell phone or his home phone or any phone on earth of late. “Of late.” Ouch!

I think I have had enough of phones and “jumps” lately myself.

So that emergency ambulance run from the Neon Nightmare was for naught. My poor MissTemple! Just when she had intended to tell Mr. Max “good-bye,” he has gone to the Great Good-bye in the Sky.

My whiskers droop. He died young. I can understand Miss Midnight Louise’s fury at the accident. It had looked rigged to me too. Mr. Max was too expert to take a fall without sabotage in the picture. I admit that I will miss my human rival and look-alike.

My MissTemple will be beside herself when she finds out. For now, I must forsake the trail of Mr. Max’s fatal fall and go whither she goeth, to be there when the roof caves in. And it will.

Chapter 5

Twist and Shout

Temple pulled her red Miata into the Crystal Phoenix’s entry area to shouts and applause.

She jumped out as the parking valet took it, realizing she was wearing her hot pink Steve Madden slides. Maybe that was what was getting all the twisting of necks and shouting.

“Amore,” the Italian word for love, was supposed to hit your eye like a “big pizza pie,” according to the old song, but Temple was being whomped in the iris by a wave of purple and red clothing.

People clothed in both colors were streaming through the glass doors into the Crystal Phoenix lobby like so many bicolor birds of paradise.

People. Check that: women. Women wearing T-shirts and feather boas and high heels and wide-brimmed hats, dragging wheeled purple leopard-pattern luggage, wearing red lipstick and purple eye shadow, women of size, women of no size, like her. Wait! Older women. Well, “seasoned” women, as Gail Sheehy had put it so profitably in her latest life-state book.

The lobby was teaming with red and purple. Temple felt positively dowdy in pink. Then she spotted a pink hat here and there amid the flock and felt better.

Until she remembered that a woman in pink had been killed. She had no idea where Electra might be, so she dialed her landlady’s cell phone.

“Yes?”

The voice was brisk, female, and not Electra’s.

Temple couldn’t have misdialed; Electra’s cell phone number was in her directory.

She muttered something about misdialing anyway. “You were calling Mrs. Lark?”

“Yes.”

“Who is this?”

“Who is this?”

“The police. Who are you and why are you calling?”

“I’m a friend of Mrs. Lark’s and I heard that something had gone wrong at the hotel.”

At that momentTemple became aware of a tall pale figure behind her, and turned. It wasn’t a ghost, it was a Fontanabrother in an expensive Italian ice-cream suit, accompanied by her errant aunt Kit, who had not come home to the Circle Ritz the night before and was looking not the least worse for wear.

Temple’s mother’s sister, a New York City actress turned romance novelist, had come to stay with Temple for a few days. She had surprised the heck out of Temple by ending up having more than a few dates with the eldest of Vegas’s Most Eligible Bachelor frat pack, the nine single Fontana brothers. Their uncle, Macho Mario Fontana, was the last of the mob bosses. The brothers were presumed to be elegant quasi-muscle around town. They owned, among other things, Gangsters’ vintage limousine service. The youngest, and number ten, was married and owned this hotel.

Aldo Fontana—tall, dark, and dangerous—took the phone from a frazzled Temple’s hand. “This is Crystal Phoenix security,” his majestic baritone mentioned, almost threatened in a silky, seductive way. Kit rolled her eyes behind his looming back and pantomimed fanning herself and swooning.