Unknown - 16_Cat_In_An_Orange_Twist

This was a major news story in these terrorism-haunted days, the retired newshound in Temple noted dully. That daily headline dog wouldn’t hunt for her tonight. She was as dazed and glazed as any other innocent bystander.

Everything seemed a dream, including … or especially… the strangely charged interlude with Matt on the floor. In the dark. Scared to death. Of bullets. Or of something else. Getting horizontal with someone of the opposite sex always made those ol’ devil hormones act up. And Matt wasn’t just “someone.”

It still haunted her. The strange lonely interlude in her life when her only serious significant other ever, Max Kinsella, was utterly gone-vanished. Just then Matt had turned up at the Circle Ritz … equally mysterious, and sincere, vulnerable … needing something. Maybe her. Now Max was out of reach again, and it unnerved her. Maybe she needed people who needed people. But who needed her the most? Who did she most need? Whom. If she could debate grammar she was still in one piece.

Danny and Simon came to share her huge ottoman. “How’re you doing, munchkin?” Danny asked.

“Not a yellow brick road in sight.”

“Overrated,” he said. “I prefer pothole-free asphalt. Gad, I wonder when they’ll let us go.”

“I was glad to hear your voice. I hadn’t thought of the lights.”

“Stagecraft Rule Number One. When in doubt, dowse the lights, people! What they can’t see, they can’t criticize.” Danny

laughed heartily.

“How’d you and Simon manage to find each other?”

“My gently modulated taskmaster voice, how else? I haven’t drilled fifteen million clumsy feet into oblivion without being able to give marching orders.”

“I was heading for you, too,” Temple said. “You were the only one sensible enough to keep us all grounded.”

“Danny isn’t sensible,” Simon put in. “He was making a damn-fool target of himself.”

“So I’ve been told by an associate myself,” Temple said. “It’s hard to just crouch there and do nothing.”

Danny nodded at Nadir, standing off by himself, watching the police action with a glower.

“He’s the guy who got to the switch. Funny. I’d peg him for the shooter. Talk about a bad actor.”

Temple sighed as she contemplated Nadir’s sullen face. She had a hunch all his buttons were being pushed in tandem

tonight.

Something moved in the fringe of her vision. She saw Matt escort Janice to a police officer, who checked his notebook, then nodded them out. It was odd to see Matt as part of a couple.

Temple shook her left leg, which still tingled. “How long can they keep us here?”

“We’re already cleared,” Simon said. “Danny wanted to stay and make sure you got home all right.”

“Hey,” Temple said in her best West Side Story gang-member voice. “I’m okay. Officer Krupke will see me safe to my

wheels. You guys peel outta here. I’ll be fine.”

Danny’s forehead crinkled with doubt under his tight blond curls. He looked like an obsessive-compulsive Cupid.

She punched him on the arm. “It’s okay. I’m okay. You’re okay. I just have to stay and make sure all my little chickens are okay. Head on home while there are still some macho men left to escort you to the parking lot.”

Simon rolled his eyes, but Danny grinned. “Aren’t they the Village People all over again? I adore retro. ‘Bye, darlin’.” He air kissed her cheek and headed out with Simon.

The lights were bright and the night looked bleak. Temple felt wrung out.

She eyed the two uniforms who were taking many notes from the Wong commune. Somewhere in the center of all those tall people was a little woman who was a major cultural force and who was worth millions. Martha Stewart for the transcendental set.

Death threats.

It was so obvious, it must be so even to the local authorities who had probably never heard of Amelia Wong before.

Chapter 12

Hot Saucy

Hours passed.

Finally, after almost everyone else had been released, including the Wong party, a female officer approached Temple on

booted, big-cat feet.

The fog still inhabited Temple’s head. She tried to gather her thoughts as she walked out of the now-deserted furnishings store, past the shattered display windows that lay in puzzle pieces on the ground outside and dusted the elegant furniture inside.

Morning was warming. What Temple could see of the horizon-some low rooftops and trees-was rosy, but the parking lot lamps still glimmered eerily against the pale sky. Temple wove a little on her reinstalled high heels as Officer Paris walked her to her car.

Hardly any vehicles hunkered in the lot now.

“It’s been a long night,” the woman said. “Sure you can make it home?”

A man was leaning against Temple’s new Miata, his silhouette melding with the base of the security lamp she had parked it under. Temple inhaled fast enough to be heard.

Officer Paris’s hand went to her hip.

“It’s okay,” Temple said, not entirely sure that it was. “I know him.”

“He was attending the opening?”

“Yeah. We didn’t know we’d both be here tonight. Neighbor.”

“I’ll drive you home.” Matt had stepped into the half-light and Officer Paris shifted to attention with something quite different

from wariness … interest.

“I can drive,” Temple said. Crossly. “And … what about your car?”

“You can drop me off to pick it up tomorrow.”

“Let him drive, honey.”

“Officer Paris, that’s kinda sexist. Also the pet name.”

“Sometimes sexist is just right.” She put a hand on Temple’s arm, not custodial, just friendly.

Temple sensed the latent tremor in herself the moment somebody touched her.

“Thanks, sir.” Officer Paris adjusted the umpteen pounds of weaponry on her utility belt. “Good, um, night. Or morning.”

“I’d never be a patrol officer,” Temple commented as they watched the woman walk away. “The uniform makes you look way too hippy.”

Temple turned to face Matt over the embarrassingly shrimpy profile of her new sporty car that she apparently was too shook up to drive.

“How’d you get out of here so early?” she asked.

“I pled the necessity of my live midnight radio show.”

“So they let you walk?”

“They interviewed Janice and myself right away. Some of the cops are actually among my ‘Midnight Hour’ listeners.”

“And that’s all it takes to get a Go Home Early card at a mass shooting scene?”

Matt looked uncomfortable. “I had the name of a personal reference too.”

“Personal reference?”

“Molina.““Molina? She’s the enemy!”

“Not when she’s a homicide lieutenant and you need a favor. Besides, it’s Kinsella she’s after.”

“As I recall, she had her sights on you as a suspect in the call girl death.”

“I pretty much cleared myself.”

“You did? How? When? How come I don’t know anything about it?”

“Maybe because it wasn’t your business.” Temple mulled that one in silence.

“Don’t look like a kicked kitten,” Matt told her. “Carmen didn’t want me to broadcast the facts, mainly because the case is still open, even if it’s no longer open season on me.”

“Or Max?”

“He’d been caught on surveillance tape at the Goliath Hotel front desk earlier that evening, but he claims he was just looking out for me. I seem to have had a lot of people on that detail lately,” he added pointedly. “But even Molina can’t connect him to anyplace else in the hotel that night. Besides, a ‘Midnight Hour’ listener is a counselor. She let me know that she got a call from the victim’s cell phone moments before the death.”