Carole Douglas - Cat in a Red Hot Rage

As an unofficial "squirt," Temple felt like a tugboat cruising among a port thronged with ships of the line. Most of the women were taller and broader than she, so Temple sometimes felt like a child lost at a fairgrounds.

The fact that so many women of a certain age had attained a certain comfortable and even powerful size made Temple realize how easy it would be for one to commit a tidy job of strangulation.

Once the victim's throat was encompassed, it would surely only be a matter of ruthless compression, of indifference on a murderous scale.

People often threatened to "wring" someone's neck, but how many could follow through on such a vow for the two minutes or so that it took for the action to complete the impulse?

Not her!

She heard a distant mutter like the cooing of pigeons. Standing on tippy toes on her vintage Beverly Feldman spikes, Templespotted a male presence cleaving the crowd of red and purple furbelows.

So far only Aldo Fontana had managed that honor. This guy was as tall, but that was because he wore a hat in the sea of hats. A fawn-colored ten-gallon cowboy hat.

When Temple was able to glimpse the whole man, she saw he was tall but lean in that ready-to-blow-away mode of old cowboys.

His sun-leathered face was cadaverous, with a long, prominent jaw. His jeans were so weather-washed they looked designer-fashionable and his belt buckle was almost as big as his hat.

Of course, Temple was not the only one to have spotted this out-of-place person.

An agitation of red hats surrounded this iconic Western figure.

Then came a shriek.

Weathered Cowboy Guy turned in that direction, then shouted out, "Puddin' Puss! Is that you?”

Another shriek.

Temple clawed her way through the crowds to the scene of unseemly behavior.

The Red-Hatted League was at the center of it, forming an honor guard around Electra, who had plucked a four-inch-long hat pin out of her double-wide red chapeau and was aiming it at the Stranger in Town.

“Elmore Lark," she said, "you stay away from me.”

Temple jerked her head back to the guy. This was Electra's third husband, the bigamist? Well, he was big. Tall, anyway.

“Now, Puddin' Puss, calm down. I'm jest here to hear what happened to my Pearly Poochie.”

Temple was starting to think Elmore Lark would shortly be found strangled by a pet leash.

“Cain't we jest talk?" he asked.

“If we had 'jest talked,' Elmore Lark," Electra retorted, sheathing her hat pin in red felt with the panache of a Musketeer, "I would have had a lot happier life."

“But no darlin' baby boy Curtiss," he said with a grin.

Electra grimaced. "And when did you last have contact with your son?”

Elmore shrugged. "A while. Boy needs his mother. A daddy's jest a ding-dong bother."

“Well, you were," Electra said. "You really think I'm gonna sit down meekly and talk to you after all you did, and didn't do, years ago?"

“Waal, no, Puddin' Puss. Except I may be the only man in the state of Nevada who jest knows you didn't do in Miss Pearly Poochie.”

He raised bushy gray eyebrows. "Whatayah say? I came down here to give you an alibi.”

This Temple had to hear. She elbowed her way through a cotton-knit cloud of purple tops to take Electra's elbow and turn to Elmore Lark.

“The hotel has made an interview room available. Let's go there. Follow me."

“Now who are you, Little Lady?" Elmore asked.

“Your worst nightmare or your best chance. Follow me.”

“Yessum. I'd follow your behind anytime anywhere, Little Doggie.”

Electra managed to elbow him, hard, in the bony ribs, whileshe scampered ahead to catch up with Temple.

“You really want to talk to this scum, Temple dear?" she whispered.

“I'll talk to anyone who knew the dead woman and might have had a motive to get her that way. He's the man in the middle, Electra, and they make good witnesses, or suspects. Can you can the vitriol, however deserved, for a while?"

“For you, sure. Besides, I want to watch this worm squirm.”

Hotel conference rooms are depressingly similar: large central wood-grain table surrounded by huge, heavy, impossible-tomove leather chairs. A table along one wall usually holds coffee and hot water urns, foam cups, plastic stirring straws, fake sugar, and fake creamer.

This was the Crystal Phoenix, though, Las Vegas's classiest hotel long before the Bellagio, Paris, Venetian, and Wynn went arty and upscale.

The central table was a slab of granite topped with inch-thick glass. The sleek Herman Miller office chairs didn't take a World Wrestling Federation champion to move them.

The thick-piled carpet boasted a Chihuly-like design that would both wear well and perk up spirits.

And the coffee and tea services were sterling silver. The sugar bowls held sugar. An exotic wood box hid packets of exotic teas and Temple's favorite sugar substitute, Splenda. The matching creamers held—heavens!—real cream and skim milk, the best of both worlds.

That fact may have been why not one, but two black cats had preceded them to the conference room. That Louie! He respected no boundaries, human or feline! She had to wonder if he was after more than filched cream. Everything he did was reasonably catlike, but it often seemed to have a second purpose. He had a definite penchant for death scenes, always someone's unlucky black cat. Hmm, Midnight Louie as furry albatross . . .

Seeing the two cats together, Temple could tell that Louise's furrier frame was much smaller and her tail hair was much fatter than Louie's muscular buzz cut.

She also had old-gold eyes rather than green ones.

Despite the differences, Temple still wasn't sure which cat had mixed it up with Savannah Ashleigh's entourage. She had at first assumed it had been Louie, because he had no liking for the Ashleigh woman. But the Crystal Phoenix was Midnight Louise's territory now.

“Waal, Puddin' Puss," Elmore boomed out. "I see the cats still come to you like rats to cheese.”

The cats eyed him with the same dubious gaze Electra gave him.

“Don't keep calling me that, Elmore Lark, or I will commit murder."

“See why I came down, PP? I knew you'd lose your cool. Even if you did knock off Oleta, you'll need a character witness.”

“You're only a witness to my bad judgment decades ago."

“Sit down," Temple suggested. Ordered. "If you two keep sparring in public it won't do either one of you any good.”

“That what you brought us in here to say, Little Lady?”

“And you can drop that nickname too. As long as you're here you can tell me why you didn't kill Oleta.”

He laughed long and loud about that, then filled up a coffee cup with six teaspoons of sugar before coming to sit at the conference table across from Temple and Electra.

“I'da stood out a little in this Little Red Hen party, don'tcha think? Besides, me and Oleta's been quit for, oh, three, four years now."

“Were you officially divorced?"

“As much as God and Reno can make it so."

“Then why did she describe you as a 'bigamist'?"

“Haven't any idea." He spread his hands wide, his scrawny chest swathed in an innocent checked cowboy shirt with plastic pearl snaps down the front. A plastic cowboy.

Temple turned to Electra. "How did you know for sure you were divorced?"

“I filed the papers before I left. And a couple weeks later I got them, all stamped and signed."

“By the county, or by Elmore Lark?"

“They looked official, and I was so glad to be quit of him.”

Elmore Lark was tapping his ten-gallon hat on his angular, bejeaned knee. When the women looked at him, he looked away. And whistled.

The sound brought the two black cats lofting onto the tabletop, sighting on him like a pair of hounds from hell, eyes narrowed, hair raised, and hissing.