Carole Douglas - Cat in a Red Hot Rage

Temple felt her eyes crossing, but the TV cameras zoomed in on Savannah's cleavage and then on Matt's face as he approached the podium.

Claps and whistles faded.

Matt leaned toward the microphone, looking boyishly mischievous. "I would like to thank the pulchritudinous Miss Ashleigh for her extremely wholesome delivery of the introduction.”

The paraphrase of JFK's response to Marilyn Monroe's notoriously inciting "Happy Birthday" serenade spawned another round of hoots, applause, and catcalls.

Temple let out a long-held breath. Matt would do just fine. Now, let the games begin!

"Girls just want to have fun," Candy Crenshaw was saying into her microphone. "Boys just want to have guns." The Red Hat Sisterhood's clown princess was ready to crack wise.

Only four minutes into the debate, tempers were already boiling over.

“Just a minute, Ms. Crenshaw," Matt said. "Let's get this straight. "You're saying that grown men can't indulge their fantasy personas, but that women can?"

“Women can-can," Cal Crenshaw shot back, leaning to look around the moderator's podium to glare at his ex-wife. "I happen to know this woman is sixty-three and a half years old. Why is she got up like a saloon girl from the Old West?”

A titter stirred the audience, for the feather boas did scream

“saloon floozy."

“Thank you, gentlemen and ladies," Crenshaw went on with a tip of his Western hat brim.

“Why are you got up as Wyatt Earp?" Kit asked quickly.

“To match you gals," another BHB panelist said. "Anything you can do we can do better."

“Can you get five thousand soul brothers to meet in Las Ve- gas?" Candy Crenshaw asked. "How many of you disgruntled dudes are there? Fifteen in all?"

“That's enough to ruffle your feathers," Crenshaw bragged.

Matt intervened. "Let's have a duel of the membership num- bers, ladies and gents. Gentlemen?"

“ Mmmble-mmmble," Crenshaw muttered into his mike.

“I didn't quite hear that," Matt prodded.

“Forty-five:' he answered.

“Must be their waist sizes," Candy Crenshaw quipped.

The audience roared.

“Look who's talking?" Elmore Lark riposted.

“Enough," Matt said, "or we'll all think you're comparing IQs.”

Laughter came from the audience and both sides of the debating table.

“Look:' Matt said, "can't you Black Hat guys admit you get a kick from dressing up in an over-the-top 'uniform' and parading around in public?"

“We have points to make," Mike Crenshaw growled. A little.

“So do the ladies." Matt was now firmly in the role of peace- maker.

Things were getting so cozy that the water pitcher was cross- ing the dividing line of the podium and snaking its way from the red-and-purple side to the black-and-blue side.

Temple felt like a diplomat. Both sides were kind of cute, re- ally, the flamboyant middle-aged folks playing dress-up. Even the issues they raised were mostly moot. People their age could hardly care that passionately about the sexual one-upmanship one-upwomanship games anymore, could they?

She eyed Matt with fond pride. He'd been perfect for this delicate assignment. Maybe, when the clips ran on TV, he'd get some master of ceremonies gigs out of it. Not that she wanted him out of town any more than he was . . .

Even Electra's ex, Elmore Lark, appeared to be mellowing. He coughed into a Western kerchief, then stood up to wave at the crowd, doffing his hat and putting hand on heart.

That was a bit much. He was an unadmitted bigamist, no matter the excuses he made, not some hokey Buffalo Bill Cody impersonator waving at the audience like a star performer... Oops. He keeled over onto the table.

He must have been drinking, had a concealed pint of something in the back pocket of his jeans.

Oops.

Temple started running to the front of the room, but by now the whole audience was rising and buzzing. TV videographers were crowding like crows with camcorders around that end of the table.

Elmore Lark had been taken ill.

Or . . . killed. Right in front of God and TV cameras and everyone.

Chapter 29

Lark to Lark?

The sirens wailed away down the Strip.

Elmore Lark lay in the back of an ambulance under the intense care of two emergency technicians.

Temple was about ready to ride along with them as a patient. Her first job after alerting hotel security to call an ambulance was to drag Electra out of the room to the nearest Fontanabrother.

“Home, James," Temple had said. That smooth, olive-skinned Fontana brow had puckered.

“I'm Armando, MissTemple—"

“She needs to vanish. Fast."

“Ah. Just the job for a Viper. Madame?" He bowed and offered his arm to Electra, who promptly forgot all about the clear and present danger to her loathed not-really-ex-husband. Temple was left unescorted, and uninspired.

The Crystal Phoenix continued to be the site of homicide most bona fide. The Red Hat Sisterhood's "Big Wheel in Las Vegas" convention kept coming up corpses. Temple's best and biggest client kept showing up on the evening news in less than a positive light, and Max was MIA.

Matt, however, was standing by his woman. Right now. And he was way more bracing than even a Fontana brother.

“What a rotten break," he told Temple, massaging her iron-hard shoulder muscles. "Although the way those panelists were snipping at each other during the debate, it's a wonder I'm not finely chopped liver."

“Thank God," Temple said. "I really don't know what to do. This convention seems primed for trouble, not to mention murder. Every time I try to turn the thing around, it gets worse."

“I'll say," Matt said, sounding grim.

“What? What don't I know now?"

“The cops can't guarantee I can leave in time for my 'Midnight Hour' show. Lark's collapse could be medical, but the EMTs didn't detect anything obvious. So it could be anything, including murder. So that's how they're treating the scene and every 'actor' in it. It seems the water pitcher passed through my hands to both sides of the debating table."

“The water pitcher? They're thinking poisoned water? Do you know how impossible that would be?"

“Obviously, you do." Matt waited.

“Water is tasteless as well as clear. It'd be almost impossible to doctor with strong poisons, which smell, taste, and look bad!"

“I doubt I'm a serious candidate. The police just need a candidate and I was up there on the podium with all those unknown quantities.”

Temple wrapped her hand through his arm.

“It's that pale Fontana Brothers suit. It made you look suspicious."

“It made you like it, so it's not all bad.”

She leaned her head against his upper arm. "I am soflummoxed here. It's bad enough that Electra is a suspect for the first murder. If her bigamist non-ex-husband dies, she's a shoo-in for the role of serial killer."

“That marriage, real or not, was ages back in time. People today don't hold on to the bitterness of a failed marriage as long as they used to."

“That's true." She looked up at him. "But your mother did.”

“They weren't married."

“That's why she's so bitter."

“What does my mother have to do with it?"

“It just made me remember that the body may age but the emotions don't."

“That true for you and Max?”

She reared back. "He's out of my life. I just want it to be because I said so, not because something bad happened to him.”

“So now you're God?"

“You won't get this, or how your mother feels, unless you become a girl.”

That made him pause. "You're right. My mom's furious because my father was finessed out of her life, and mine, by trickery. His relatives just told this pregnant young girl that he'd died `over there,' and they'd give her a two-flat to live in and rent out the other half to keep her and the baby, and good-bye. When he was just fine! She never had any say in it, and neither did he. Now, when I found him and he wants to talk to her—sincerely, I think—she hates him, not the people who kept them apart. If that's girl-think, I don't get it, but I guess it makes sense to her, at least emotionally."