Unknown - 19_Cat_In_A_Red_Hot_Rage

The older women were the utter opposite of their gaudy, glitzy Red Hat selves.

Except for Starla. Her lips and nails were a fresh, gleaming crimson color. She was out of her Red Hat Sisterhood red and purple, but poured into denim glitz: low-rise rhinestone-decorated jeans and matching jacket, low-cut white T-shirt featuring a sequined image of a sexy cowgirl on a bucking bronco horse.

Her frankly bleached blond hair was sprayed into a hussy hive of bedhead waves and her painted red toenails peeked out from strappy hooker-high heels.

She was “strappy” someplace else: in the recording wire taped to her torso. The ex-bounty hunter had all the right equipment for going undercover, if not under the covers, with Elmore Lark.

“It’s wonderful you know how to get wired,” Electra commented.

“When you’re a bounty hunter,” Starla explained, “sometimes you gotta surprise ‘em, or ambush ‘em. And sometimes you gotta trick ‘em.” She heaved her breasts higher in the tight T-shirt, giving the cowgirl a potent buck. “And sometimes you gotta seduce ‘em.”

“In Elmore’s case,” Electra said fervently, “I’m glad you gotta do that, not me. But I can hear every word in the van, right?”

“You all can. Ole Elmore is not only gonna be recorded, he’s gonna be broadcast live. You think that anonymous bottle of Johnnie Walker we sent over four hours ago has done the trick?” she asked Electra.

“He and Johnny must be bosom buddies by now. He was never a drinker, but he never had this much pressure.”

“I just hope he hasn’t passed out:’ Temple said.

“If he has, these’ll wake him up. When high-tech equipment lets you down, the low-tech equipment never fails.” Boosting her boobs again, Starla tested the spandex in her jeans by leaving the van, then minced across the hot parking lot to one of the ground-floor doors.

Temple slid the van door closed as soon as Starla’s last spike heel was out of the way. That quick glance around showed an abandoned lot, except for two bejeaned guys with scruffy dark jaws working a junker sixties Impala blistered with Las Vegas sun psoriasis.

Starla’s knuckles were hitting a faded, painted door. “Y’ all in there, honey? I’m that friend of Johnny’s.”

Starla turned to wink at the van a moment before the door opened and she vanished inside.

“What do you hope Starla will get out of Elmore?” Electra asked as she and Judy and Phyll and Mary Lou hunkered down beside Temple by the radio receiver. An attached recorder was taping away.

“Bragging. Unguarded answers. I prepped her on where to lead the conversation. Shh! We’re rolling.”

“Sit down, honey,” came Elmore’s smarmy voice. “Bed’s fine. This dump hasn’t got a chair you could put more’n a wastebasket on without breaking, and you’ve got a bod born to break beds, if you don’t mind my sayin’ so. So you sent me this nice full bottle of whiskey! What was the ‘Congratulations’ note for? When did you join my fan club, which is purty low on applicants lately?”

“I just thought you got a raw deal. I don’t like dames who kiss and tell. That Oleta deserved having her neck wrung.”

There was a clink of glass on glass. “I’m glad,” came Elmore’s slurred voice, “I’da hoped the person who sent me this would show up. I left a little Johnny for you to have some. I ain’t got anything personal against Oleta. Or didn’t, that is. And I wasn’t the one wrung her neck, that’s for sure. She just was causing me a bucket of problems with that ‘memoir’ thing and all those e-mails calling me every kind of whipsnake there ever was on earth.”

“Hurts a man’s pride,” Starla prodded.

“Pride, heck! Coulda flattened my pocketbook.”

“Couldn’t have hurt that much, judging by this place.”

“Hell, this is jest a hideout. Doesn’t mean I ain’t got a wad or a lot of ‘em up north in Reno. Or maybe something big comin’ in. Doesn’t mean I can’t take a hot little number like you out for a real big night on the town. What’s yer name again, honey?”

“Starla.”

“Now ain’t that purty? Almost as purty as Mr. Walker here, he is some flash dude, huh? I kin be a flash dude, too, when I wanta be. What can you be?”

“A lot of fun, honey.”

“Waal, my little sweet potato, you sure are cinched in tight to all those sparkly clothes. Maybe I can help ease up the bindings under your saddle blanket.”

“That old lech,” Electra fumed. “He wasn’t any hot stuff when he was thirty years younger.”

“Viagra,” Judy said, rolling her eyes. “Makes a man into a blowhard.”

“First,” Starla said over the wire, “I gotta make sure you won’t throttle me accidentally in your sleep.”

“Nah. I never throttled anything lately but this bottle. I was mad at Oleta, but I never woulda killed her.”

The women in the van exchanged glances. This wasn’t the damning confession they needed.

Temple leaned forward. “Go, Starla! Push it.”

“You were hanging around the convention with the Black Hat Brotherhood,” Starla prodded. “You must have wanted something from her, or you’d have stayed away.”

“I asked her to can the memoir crap. Nicely.”

“And she said?”

“Never.”

“You sure you didn’t kill her to stop her?”

“I didn’t have to, honey. Someone else did it for me.”

“Your non-ex-wife, Electra.”

“Don’t you call her that! Everybody’s claimin’ to be my ex or my current or my soon-to-be. A guy gets tired of that. His past trailin’ after him blightin’ his future. I wished they’d all jest go away.”

“If Electra had been charged with Oleta’s death, that would have happened.”

“Yup. But that didn’t happen.”

“Elmore sounds real regretful about that,” Electra commented sarcastically.

“Stop that, you naughty thing!” Starla said, giggling. “I’ll have a tad more scotch.”

“Me too,” Elmore said.

Glasses clinked again.

“This is sooo0 sleazy,” Phyll commented enthusiastically. “It’s like on TV.”

“Soap opera or cop show?” Judy asked.

“Maybe both.”

“Shhh!” Temple said. “Sleazy” wouldn’t help solve the murders.

“What about that woman who was taping the events?” Starla probed between giggles. “She was dead in that chair in thestores area when you were making like a female impersonator. What on earth made you even try that?”

“Oleta’s stupid ‘Hat Heaven’ booth. See, she’d always fancied herself a writer. Liked to play with words. When that `lost’ hatbox showed up and went out for all to see, I spotted that it was the only hatbox she’d ever had with a mounded top. That was all wrong. See, women stack those things. Oleta had one closet all with stacked hatboxes inside. You don’t make the tops mounded.”

“Ah, real smart, Elmore.”

“Right. I knew right away that would be where she’d hide her tell-all manuscript. It would be with her even when she was outta town, see? By then I was a suspect character, so I figured that if I looked like all those dressed up dolls, no one would spot me.”

“It worked.”

“Except for that miserable little Pink Hat brat. She’s the one who put the hatbox up for bidding, and I bet she found the manuscript before she did it. She deserved a nice little throttle, but—”

“But—?” Starla’s voice was tight with hope and tension. Elmore stayed silent as the women in the van held their breaths and waited for a damning confession.

“But,” he finally said after an audible bolt of scotch, “someone else beat me to it. These hands ain’t made for strangling. They’re made for—”

“Stop that!” The sound of a slap. “Those hands aren’t touching anything on me until I know you didn’t kill those women.”