Carole Douglas - Cat in a Red Hot Rage

“It goes great with your new blond do. Come in, dear.”

Electra's entry hall was a hexagonal affair lined in mirrored blinds, so multiple muumuus greeted Temple's eyes. Also multiples of her still foreign-looking blond self.

Maybe if she dyed her hair back to its natural red shade, she'd find Max. That was superstitious thinking, but desperate people turn to symbolic notions.

Temple passed herself coming and going in the mirrored blind slats. Now that she was clad in Pink Lady hues she looked as nauseatingly sweet as a tropical drink to a beer buff.

Electra's living room was the usual dim and mysterious, not to mention occupied by hulking pieces of forties-vintage furniture.

Temple loved vintage, but one had to draw the line somewhere, and for her, oversize forties jungle florals in shades of forest-green and chartreuse were it.

She sat gingerly on the only floral-free chair in the room, a plain maroon mohair lounge chair. Mohair was a stiff, buzz-cut wool texture as welcoming to the epidermis as falling into a native stake pit.

Electra sat with a grateful "oof " on the long lumbering sofa hunched against the wall. Lights were dim here, but a green glint caromed off the huge glass ball sitting atop the vintage blond-wood TV set. A pair of small, eerie red lights blinked like Christmas bulbs at Electra's ankles.

Since this was firmly spring, as much as Las Vegas ever admitted to such a pleasant, moderate season, Temple assumed the red lights were the reflective eyes of Electra's psychotically shy cat, Karma, the mystic Birman.

Come to think of it, the atmosphere up here was thick enough to slice with a chain saw. Electra might very well be a Las Vegas strangler with a gender-bending mission . . . Instead of the literal lady-killer Bluebeard, she could be a blue-haired lady killer of husbands.

“Did you get the family tree written down?"

“I tried, but I just can't concentrate enough right now. Finding a dead woman, even if she turned out to be someone I had no sympathy for, is very discombobulating.”

Temple picked up the notepad and pen that Electra had only managed to doodle on.

“Okay. We'll do this as an interview. You said you had five husbands." Temple asked, pen poised, "Where are they all now?"

“Goodness, dear, I don't know! What's the point of leaving them if they're still on your Christmas card list?"

“You must have known Elmore and Oleta were in Reno, though."

“Nope." Electra gazed at the green globe over the dead TV as the red lights danced at her ankle level. "He was easy to forget."

“I imagine most of them were, from what you said, but I need to know the who, where, and when on all of them.”

“Not the why, though?"

“No. That would be prying," Temple said demurely, as befitted a Pink Lady.

As soon as she got through with this convention she was going to ditch this ditzy hat for something red, even if it was a wig the color of her real hair.

“I'm glad you're leaving something for me to have and to hold," Electra said dryly. "Just how serious do you think this being under suspicion is for me?"

“Very. It turns out your next Mrs. Lark was writing a memoir and mailing bits and pieces all over the Internet."

“What would Oleta have to write about? Elmore was dull, dull, dull."

“Not according to one tidbit gleaned from Oleta's compulsive Internet confessions, or maybe it was just canny book promotion: she said her long 'marriage' ended when she was abandoned in a ghost town in Nevada by a bigamist."

“Bigamist!" Electra jumped up as the little Rudolph-red noses at her ankles vanished under the sofa's swaying cocoa-colored fringe.

Her shock reassured Temple. She hadn't heard it from Oleta, then.

Electra was still in angry orbit. "Oleta is saying that bastard didn't really divorce me? Where is he? I'll kill him now if she didn't do the job first before coming here."

“Am I glad this is just between us and the fire-eyed feline under the couch, because murder suspects must never threaten to slay new victims in public. Unless you're a third-world dictator. Are you?"

“Of course not? What are you getting at?"

“The fact is, I don't really know anything about your private life. When a murder happens, no life in the vicinity is private anymore. In this case, especially yours.”

Electra sat again in the dimness. Her sigh almost stirred the dark floral draperies at the doors to her patio.

“Well, darn, Temple. I came here to forget all about my past life. It wasn't that successful."

“But you're an entrepreneur. You own and operate this building and the attached Lovers' Knot Wedding Chapel. You've got energy, singular style, and tenants who adore you."

“Really, you guys adore me?"

“What's not to adore? You're patient, creative, fun, and always listen. You're our dorm mother."

“ 'Dorm mother.' I like that." Electra's hands curled together on her chest.

Temple realized for the first time that she'd never seen any rings, nary a one, on those busy, plump fingers. And here was Temple with a seriously significant ring she wasn't quite ready to flash, like a novice stripper with a G-string and no nerve to wear it. At least Temple had a couple thoroughly painful thong panties in her lingerie drawer.

“You already know Elmore was number three," Electra was saying in a monotone, subdued voice. "You put that in your notebook. I never bothered to write any of this down—unlike dear, dead Oleta!"

“Whenever you talk to the police again, none of these theatrics. Pretend you're a Stepford wife. Only say what you have to and without any emotion whatsoever."

“When, not if?"

“When, not if, Electra. You were too darn convenient to the body. Somebody else probably figured that out too. But don't worry, the Red-Hatted League is on it."

“I want to be there with them!"

“We'll see." Temple found the pen slipping between her fingers and rolling under the sofa fringe. "Electra, what is that under your couch?”

Electra looked down. "Ali, besides dust bunnies? Maybe my cat, Karma."

“Is she declawed?"

“Never!"

“Thanks, I guess I won't risk patting around down there in the dark. I'll try to remember what you say and write this down later."

“Try to re-mem-ber," Electra quavered in a thready soprano. "Husband number one," Temple demanded.

“I've never really counted him."

“Electra!"

“That's what we girls did in my day, my dear. We either married any man who ever kissed us, or we never married at all and got known as hippies. Darren and I eloped in senior year of high school, and he then further eloped with a bottle of rye a few weeks later. I've never seen or heard from him again, and am the better for it. I don't think that minister was real, anyway, and I never thought to ask to see the license. Boys would do anything to get into your girdle in those days."

“ Girdle?"

“ Tubes or panties with industrial-strength elastic you had to spend ten minutes getting on. They were tight enough to bite like a snapping turtle, believe me, if any roaming fingertips roamed too far. I didn't lose my virginity until my second husband.”

Temple cleared her throat. "Darren must have really liked that bottle. It's awfully dark and hot in here. I may swoon."

“That's all right. All the floors are covered in Persian carpets; lots of nap."

“So who was number two?"

“Another elopement. Billy was a filling station attendant with an urge to—"

“Don't say it!”

—go to refrigeration school. Between his double shifts, I somehow got left out. I divorced him and I moved yet again to forget."

“And then came Elmore."

“Not a moment too soon. I actually had delusions about him.”