Unknown - 19_Cat_In_A_Red_Hot_Rage

“Personally? I’ve got to clear Electra and get Matt out of the suspect picture. Professionally? I need to get the media heat off the Crystal Phoenix. This is their biggest convention ever, and doing it in partnership with the Goliath is a good deal for both hotels, neither of which is exactly the new kid on the block.”

“Your Debate of the Sexes scheme only upped the bad publicity,” he pointed out. “And upped the possible murder raps around here. And Electra Lark remains a prime suspect.”

“I know! And it roped my fiancé into the murderous merriment going around.”

“Fiancé,” Alch teased. “You sure like to sling that word around.”

“Guilty.” Yeah, she did. She’d had too long a run as an almost fiancée with Max. At bottom, she was a middle-of-thecountry girl, a heartland product. And her heart needed to know it had the hope of a permanent home.

“That’s okay,” Alch said softly. “Old-fashioned values go good with that hat of yours.”

“Molina,” she began.

“She’s my boss. Don’t go there.”

Temple reassembled her forces. “I really don’t want to, and I don’t think any sane man would either.” No rise from Alch. “Speaking of insane men, was Elmore Lark really a murder victim?”

Alch nodded. “Only the word is ‘almost.’ He’ll recover. That’s top secret, by the way.”

“Recover? Oh. That’s good news.” That was also theory-busting news. Still, Elmore had been murderously attacked, evenif he hadn’t succumbed. How? “Was it the water pitcher? How could it be? A clear, tasteless substance is a lousy medium for poison. And it had to have been poison, right?”

“I guess you’re moonlighting as a technical consultant for CSI: Crime Scene Investigation these days, huh?”

“No. That’s a bunch of hokum, I know that. But it had to have been poison.”

“Why do you think so?”

“The public collapse, while on camera. If the cause of the attack wasn’t natural, it had to have been induced by a lethal substance. But not in the water.”

Alch nodded.

That was all she was going to get from him, confirmation of her assumptions. That was more than any other detective she knew would give her.

Temple began pacing. “Wait! He had to have carried the poison on him!”

Alch’s expression became even more poker-faced, telling her she was moving in the right direction.

She paced again, then stopped right in front of him, saying, dramatically, “A hip flask full of liquor.”

“Slightly warm,” he said.

“Flasks carry straight liquor. The taste is strong and overbearing. It would mask almost any poison if Elmore had swigged some down in the men’s room before going to the panel and on camera. Even the deadliest poison takes a few minutes to act.”

Alch shrugged and nodded. “I’d put you on CSI.”

“So.” Temple paced some more in her smart hot pink, high-heeled slides.

Her pink hat wasn’t the only thing Morrie Alch liked about her, and friendly paternalism only went so far with even the most decent of men. Maybe he missed his daughter at cajoling sweet sixteen.

Temple had never been a cajoler, but she liked to let her imagination loose.

“Elmore didn’t carry a hip flask,” she both asked and stated outright.

He nodded.

She paced again, recalling the hokey Western outfits he wore. “Something else he carried was tainted, then. In his jeans’ hip pocket.”

Alch’s expression betrayed surprised agreement.

“I feel like I’m on the old Family Feud game show. I have to guess the top five most likely answers. Breath mints or those little strips!”

Alch’s expression grew even more deadpan.

She’d missed. “No, I guess Elmore Lark wouldn’t be as self-conscious as a computer nerd on a date at this stage of the game, would he?”

Alch chuckled.

“Wait. Tobacco! It can be lethal. Poison-spiked cigarettes. A whole pack of them. It would work slowly, then, bingo, the dose would build up and a quick ciggie to ease the tension of the debate could be the Camel that broke the weak straw that was Elmore Lark’s back.”

Alch laughed out loud. “Nice way to put it. Yeah, if you’re talking Fu Manchu or some other pulp villains of the early twentieth century. This is the twenty-first century, kid.”

“But Elmore Lark was a twentieth, even a nineteenth-century kind of guy, especially in regard to women.”

Temple sighed. No poison in the water. Or in any liquor or cigarettes Elmore could have carried on him. Maybe he bit his nails!

She said as much to Alch, who bent over double from laughing. “Creative, but he’d need a daily manicure of poison to do the job.”

“Some seductive Red Hat honey maybe could have talked him into a harmless clear nail polish, then, wham-o!”

“You think you could talk me into some harmless clear nail polish?”

“If I wasn’t engaged, maybe I could.”

“No. Real men don’t do their nails. Elmore’s a real man.”

“Yeah. Lying, lazy, deceptive, womanizing …”

“Agreed. The guy’s a rat. A lot of people like to poison rats. And his kind of rat, the poisoner would likely be a woman. Poison is a woman’s weapon.”

“But Elmore’s a man’s man, in the worst interpretation of that.”

Temple tapped her toe, beating a fast, impatient beat on the stone-cold floor. That’s how cold she felt her guesses were. Alch was still sitting here playing the game only because her earlier guesses had been in the ballpark.

Time to slam something into far left field.

“If it was in his jeans pocket, it had to be as small as a tiny flask or cigarette case. What are both of them? Metal?”

Alch had stopped grinning and was looking ready to be impressed. She couldn’t stop now. Family Feud. She’d always felt sorry for the players who were last to guess after all the most obvious answers had been taken.

Elmore Lark. Aging urban cowboy. High-heeled boots, big-buckled belt, neckerchief, ten-gallon hat. A man’s man while taking women to the cleaners.

“You’re right,” Alch said consolingly, “that it was something that would fit in a jeans pocket.”

“Not cigarettes? Wait. A cigar?”

“Nicotine is somewhat toxic,” he admitted, “but not in this amount, and not instantly. Besides, a smoker would have built up resistance.”

“And he wasn’t a smoker?”

Alch shook his head. “Although nicotine can be lethal in more than cigarettes over years of inhalation, it wasn’t in this case. In this case it was a, er, smoke screen.”

“So something else was lethal to Elmore Lark? He was a drinker. Maybe one of those airplane-sized bottles of scotch was how he concealed it. That would fit in a jeans pocket.”

Alch paused. He didn’t dare speak too loudly, or plainly.

“Let’s just say that Elmore Lark wasn’t toasting his own health.”

Temple felt she had pushed Alch’s envelope to the seam-splitting point. She said her thanks and good-bye, and mulled the detective’s parting words as she left the room for the colorful chaos of the Red Hat Sisterhood–populated lobby.

Elmore Lark “wasn’t toasting his own health.”

A toast had killed him? Alcohol? Sure, you could kill yourself by overusing alcohol, usually over years. But how could someone else kill you with it if not with poison in it? And Alch had implied alcohol wasn’t the medium.

If something at the debate hadn’t poisoned him, the attempt looked much more premeditated and distant. But ifs were all she had. She sure wasn’t going to get any more information about it from the LVMPD.

At least Matt and the water pitcher were off the hook. Except hers.

Chapter 35

Hints and Intimations