Unknown - 16_Cat_In_An_Orange_Twist

“But that’s bygones,” Rafi said, smiling.

Smiling at her!

“You got an address?”

No, she lived under a Dumpster! Now what, ballsy little broad? she asked her nervier self.

Now Matt Devine to the rescue.

He had eased onto the scene like Cool Hand Luke. “Sony to interrupt,” he told Temple, nodding impersonally at Nadir.

“Some ceremony at the central atrium where the car is. They need you.”

Temple jumped up. “Sony,” she told Rafi. “Gotta run.”

His lips tightened, his expression saying thanks for reminding him that he was just scummy hired help and had no business talking to a woman whose life he had saved.

“I enjoyed talking to you,” Temple said in farewell.

And she had. She had really enjoyed learning that the Molina scenario might have another side.

Still, she was glad to go off with Matt.

“Who was that guy?” he was asking as suspiciously as Max would. “He sure was monopolizing you.” “Do they really want me anywhere?”

“Yeah.” Matt stopped now that Rafi Nadir was three vignettes behind them and out of sight. “I do. Here.”

“Really.” Temple wondered what a genuine ballsy little broad would say to a provocative statement like that.

Chapter 8

Hot Sauce

“This place gives me the creeps,” Matt said. “Not to mention the company you were just keeping.” He looked around the elegant, empty rooms. “Is there any place we can talk confidentially?”

“Any place that isn’t orange. That’s the fashion statement of the evening, and that’s where people congregate. Hey. There’s a green office vignette just next door. A designer named Kelly did it.”

“Good.” Matt took Temple’s elbow to usher her into the adjoining vignette. He urged her into a corner behind a huge entertainment center-in an office?

The nook was cosy and intimate and Temple could see that Matt was too upset to see just where he’d placed them.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“This place. The whole … mood feels wrong. Half the employees seem to be trolling around to attack the other half.”

“You’ve never worked for a large company, I see.”

“And who was that thug you were chatting up?”

“You didn’t give me time to introduce you. And I was hardlychatting him up. He waylaid me. Like you did just now. What’s really bothering you?”

Matt looked over his shoulder and shook his head. “I don’t know. I think I was just sort of hit on.”

“Well, it can’t have been me, or you’d have noticed. Janice? She looks like such a reserved lady…

“Not Janice! Someone else I don’t even know.”

“That’s been known to happen.”

“Not to me. I’ve got some sort of psychic Teflon coating. People don’t mess with me that way.” ” `People.’ Ah. It was a guy.”

He looked disappointed that she figured it out. “Yeah. I mean, I’m just standing there. .

“Highly inciting. Shouldn’t do it.”

“Temple!”

“You’re not responsible for other people’s actions, or reactions. Forget about it.”

“It’s hard,” he admitted after half a minute. “Here I’ve got Jerome from seminary hanging around, and-”

“Didn’t you get this sort thing in the seminary? From the recent news-”

“No. I didn’t. I walked under this Teflon umbrella all through it. A lot of us did. Calling us naive hardly begins to describe it. It’s just that I’ve seen Janice and Jerome lit into by some witch on wheels, and now I see you getting cosy with Jabba the Hut in a corner … all you’re missing is the chain-mail bikini.”

“I can get one,” Temple said brightly.

“What?”

“A chain-mail bikini. I know a guy in the desert, name of Mace. He custom makes them. Knives too.”

“Temple. That was just a figure of speech. And how did you run into an outlaw character like that?”

“I have my ways. Matt, lighten up! This is the opening event for a big new commercial venture. People are going to be nervous. They are going to be crabby. They are going to be paranoid.”

“You think I’m overreacting.”

“Did I say that?”

“No. But I knew what you were thinking.”

“Then will you get it for me for Christmas?”

He sighed then, and really looked at her. “You’re right. This other stuff is mostly nothing. I was worried about who I saw you with.”

“I wasn’t worried about who I saw you with.”

“No?” He stepped a little closer as all expert interrogators do. “She said you were.”

“She did?”

“Who?”

“Whoever we’re talking about.”

Temple realized that they hadn’t been this near, or this alone, since a close encounter in the hallway to her apartment before everything went to hell a couple weeks ago. If you could call having everyone you know involved in a suspicious death

“hell?’

“Look,” she said. “It’s been a rough couple of weeks. I think everyone is a little edgy. I was supposed to be finding my meal ticket. Apparently something is ‘Wong’ in the Maylords world right now.”

“That’s a terrible pun, but I guess she deserves it, from what you’ve implied. So what’s keeping you?”

Temple shrugged, and waited for him to catch on.

He stepped back. “Sony. Guess the paranoia is catching.” She scooted around him and hit heels to travertine to head for

the front of the store.

She wasn’t surprised Matt was a little gun-shy after all he’d been through with his truly terrifying stalker. This crowd was trendy and filled with temperamental artist types. Temperamental artist types were often in-your-face. Kind of like Amelia Wong. Actually, Wong remained a cipher. It was her staff that was in-your-face.

Speaking of which, Temple had no sooner touched toe to the festive central area than she saw Amelia Wong finally facing off with someone in person. That someone was her Asian opposite: master chef Song of the Crystal Phoenix.

Call him Yang (although Temple had never known his first name). Call him Yang can cook. Call her Yin. Call her Yin-Yang can’t abide disharmony.

Call this a Zen shoot-out.

Kenny Maylord noticed Temple’s presence with a huge relieved sigh and came skittering over on the QT. “Thank God.

She’s rearranging his buffet table and he looks ready to restyle her hair-do with his chopping cleaver.”

“Never argue with a chef. They’re armed and dangerous.”

“Can you do anything with them? The TV videographers have been eating up this unpleasant scene.”

Temple braved a gantlet of four-hundred-watt lighting to enter the fray, which was spotlit by the small sun of a TV camera

light.

“Can I help?” she asked.

Chef Song, who knew her by sight as the PR rep for his employer, the Crystal Phoenix Hotel and Casino, stopped gesticulating like an armed windmill. He folded his arms, and cleaver, across his chest.

“This lady changes my buffet.”

“This man,” Wong said, “offends the inner yin with the inharmonious color of his arrangement. I cannot allow people to eat from such an ungoverned display.”

“Food is set out delicately,” said Chef Song, “in a fan of flavor, like scented flowers in a garden. Color is in second place.” “The eye and spirit must always be paramount.”

“What does a movie company have to do with Song’s buffet table? Only movie company in Las Vegas is the MGM-Grand Hotel and the three-story lion out front would make you eat your foolish words, if he were here.”

Temple took a deep breath. Chef Song was first-generation Chinese. His grasp of the language in times of stress grew colorful, to say the least. She knew his history. He had been an enormously wealthy Hong Kong businessman who had lost everything at the gaming tables … and then had reinvented himself in midlife in a foreign country as a chef. The career change had been fortuitous. He attacked his new role with youthful passion.