Unknown - 16_Cat_In_An_Orange_Twist

“Haven’t had any show-biz related projects lately,” Temple said. “I’ve never seen anybody cut a faster wake through a mob

than this.”

“Hate crowds, except onstage,” Danny explained, finally leading her into an Art Deco vignette that made her want to redo her whole place right away.“Here we are,” Danny said.

And there was indeed a “we” here.

A pudgy, short, red-faced man in a wrinkled, oatmeal-colored linen suit was gesticulating like a manic mime at a slim, tall man wearing a suit the same silky color and texture as Baileys Irish Cream.

It was like watching Oliver Hardy berating Bond, James Bond, the Roger Moore incarnation.

They turned, actors noticing an audience.

“I’m done,” the short man said … shortly. He favored Temple with a particularly venomous look, then left.

“Who is Grumpy, Dopey, and Pissed Off all put together?” Danny asked.

“The manager of the whole enchilada,” the other man answered.

He was one of those guys so dreamily handsome that the savvy woman figured out he was gay before she allowed her heart to skip a beat or her hormones to rev their engines. “This is my partner, Simon Foster,” Danny said. He drew Temple forward to introduce them with such beaming pleasure that each instantly knew the other was too important to dismiss on mere sexual preference grounds.

Temple looked past the gorgeous suit, the hair, the eyes to a smart and slightly diffident personality.

“You’re the crime-fighting PR woman,” Simon said.

“Oh, Lord.” Temple laughed. “Danny’s been casting me in some musical in his mind again. Freelance PR Superwoman. It’s just that I sometimes run across crooks:’

“Don’t we all?” Simon smiled and sighed at the same time. “What’s your gig?” Temple asked.

“Gig? Isn’t she the little trouper?” Danny asked rhetorically. “Simon is an interior designer.”

“I’ve been freelance until now,” Simon added. “The lure of Maylords was a regular paycheck, but I’ll still be able to work with my previous client list, and hopefully expand.”

Temple read the underlying message obvious in both Janice and Simon’s presence on the staff of Maylords. Times were tough. The Clinton budget overage had morphed into the Bush megadeficit. Free spirits everywhere were hitching their stars to any steady job they could find.

“Did you design this room?” Temple asked.

When Simon nodded Temple shook her head in awe. “You’ve just convinced me to jettison my whole decor and go into deep debt.”

“Maybe a little debt,” Simon answered. He glanced around, his laugh lines reversing course into a frown. “Gawd, that woman has been at my Ert� prints again.”

“Janice?” Temple asked.

“Janice? Hardly. She’s got an eye Ert� would’ve envied. It’s that Blanchard witch who thinks she’s curator-in-chief around

here. Ignorant slut.”

Simon exchanged the positions of two chrome-framed prints of elegantly attired women. The vignette gained a dynamic that had been missing before.

Temple was startled to notice how much Simon resembled Matt when his back was turned, if Matt had ever been dressed or coifed spectacularly enough to turn heads.

“Amateurs!” Danny shook out his French cuffs with a dancer’s disdainful grace. “Everybody’s an artist in his or her own

mind, and/or a critic.”

“It does sometimes seem the world of personalities veers between two poles,” Temple agreed, “the positives and the negatives.” She turned back to Simon. “It must be terrific fun to play with a string of fantasy rooms, like an ever-changing set design.”

“Or a dollhouse for adults. I wanted to put mannequins into mine, but Ainsworth, the general manager you just saw leaving, nixed that. Each designer does two or three vignettes from scratch, but management has the final say. And sometimes would-be management, like large Miss Blanchard.” Simon frowned at the fall of a drape and adjusted it. “The rest of the room settings are fairly stock arrangements meant to showcase certain lines of furniture.”

“Mannequins are a great idea!” Temple always waxed indignant to hear a creative notion quashed. “This is Las Vegas.

Anything goes. Say … if ‘management’ found mannequins too hard-edged, how about soft-sculpture people? They’d be more subtle. Do I know a source for that!”

Even Danny, who thrived on pushing real people around make-believe settings, perked up at the suggestion. “Who’s your source? I could choreograph a fabulous number mixing soft-sculpture people with real dancers.”

“My landlady at the Circle Ritz, Electra Lark, is the queen of creative soft-sculpture crowds. She fills the pews in her wedding chapel with them, even Elvis.”

“The Circle Ritz!” Simon’s face lit up like Kleig lights spotlighting Fred Astaire in a ’30s musical. “What a post-Art Deco

’50s hoot! I love driving by that round building. And you live there?”

“Me and my faithful feline companion, Midnight Louie. So does Matt Devine, who’s here tonight. Danny’s met him.”

“Any openings?” Danny asked, catching Circle Ritz fever. “We’d love a pied-a-terre closer to the Strip.”

“Electra would know. I’ll check with her.” Temple was glad the subject of her cool digs had distracted Simon from the crushing of design ideas. This was Maylords’s opening night and her PR party. Everybody should be happy, at least for the evening.

“I’d better mingle and make sure everything’s going well,” she said, suddenly sorry for lapsing into two personal conversations while on duty.

She hurried back onto the pale cream travertine road, feeling a little like Dorothy en route to the wizard. She should ensure that the Maylords brass was happy with the event.

Being congenitally short, despite the Midnight Louie black-cat heels sparkling on her feet, Temple searched for

recognizable hair, feeling rather like a scalp hunter.

Amelia Wong’s shiny black bob, with its intimations of ’20s femme fatale film stars like Louise Brooks, was a low-profile constant, a mobile, lacquered mushroom cap. Taller heads orbited her like heavenly bodies, some of them literally so, such as the equally statuesque blond Baylee and black Pritchard. Not to mention the X-Files alien-FBI types in opaque black shades.

Mark Ainsworth, the dorky, unimaginative manager, had a greasy, curly poll of dishwater brown. Kenny, Maylords’s CEO, second generation and just past thirty, wore a Walter Mondale tonsorial chop job that screamed “midwestern” in a trendy international town like Las Vegas.

Temple was so busy hunting hair she didn’t notice someone marking her out from the milling herd, although she was probably the only fast-moving person without a bent elbow holding a wineglass in the place.

Temple’s eyes paged past a knot of people, then froze and paged back.

Oh, vaulting Vladimir Kagans! That Iranian-secret-police guy in a navy suit fit for a funeral wearing a name tag reading “Joe.” That was someone she knew, who did not know her, thank God. What was C. R. Molina’s ex-squeeze Rafi Nadir doing here, and why was he passing as “Joe”?

What was he ever doing anywhere? Security work to hear him tell it, a.k.a. stalking to anyone who knew what nasty crimes he was suspected of.

And now he was walking toward her, black eyes narrowed like a hunting hawk’s.

Temple tried to pretend she hadn’t noticed him. As she turned to veer in the opposite direction, though, he somehow ended up as a roadblock. She had to stop-or careen into him. And physical contact with Molina’s bad-apple ex-cop SO was to be avoided at all costs.

The so-called Joe was still staring at her. “I know you.”