Unknown - 16_Cat_In_An_Orange_Twist

“You could have made do with a golf cart. So what’s with the eye-candy car?”

Matt shrugged. “Maybe I’m tired of certain people complaining about my modest tastes. I don’t know, Temple. I guess I got carried away. I could, so I did. I’m feeling a lot that way lately. Big mistake, huh?““Not if you take me for a ride in this baby. What’ll it do?”

“I’m not sure. One-forty? Kind of pointless.”

“The most fun things in life are kind of pointless, or hadn’t you noticed?” Temple circled the Crossfire. “It makes my Miata

look like a Tinker Toy.”

“I don’t think this is a contest.”

“Cars are always a contest.” Temple didn’t ask what she figured the Crossfire cost: around thirty-five grand.

Hmmm. Matt was still resisting buying a microwave and a cell phone, but he sprang for this?

“When’d you get it? I mean, this is a major decision. I just bought a car. I would have been glad to help.”

“It was either a Prius or this. This gets okay gas mileage. And I did all the Internet research, so I didn’t need much help.” Temple shook her head. News flash: Matt was one severely conflicted ex-priest. This glitzy Crossfire road burner was like the evil twin to an eco-friendly, gas-saving Prius.

“Canned heat on wheels,” Temple diagnosed. “I think it’s great you got it, after running around in-”

And then Temple got it. Of course! This was his bustin’- free-of-his-stalker car. No more slinking around in Electra Lark’s old pink Probe painted white to blend into a landscape where boring bathtub white cars repelled the desert sun.

That reminded Temple of Max and his all-black cars and all-black wardrobe in the nation’s hottest city. What did that say about contrariness? Always living on the edge of invisibility. When was the last time she had seen him in the light of day?

She returned to admiring Matt’s new car. “Crossfire. Cool. It must have set you back a bundle.”

“Certain people,” he said, through slightly gritted teeth, “have been urging me to become a conspicuous consumer.” Oh.

That might have been her. She? Whatever!

“It rocks!” she said. “You’ll have to give me a ride sometime.” “I’d like to.”

Hmmm. The expression in his caf� noir brown eyes might even mean it literally.

Or Temple was fantasizing again, an unwelcome new development. She had to be responding to something new in Matt, something edgy and even a little hot. No! Matt was still too innocent to make sexy double entendres. Wasn’t he? Who knew what he had learned from a couple hours with a high-end Vegas call girl? Anyway, Temple was too committed to Max, even with their current enforced semiseparation, to think about other men’s meanings. Wasn’t she? She gritted her mental teeth. She must be the only woman in the world dithering about an ex-priest on one hand, and an ex-magician on the other. The only thing they had in common was in being uncommonly attractive. And her, of course. Youch!

“I’m glad you got it,” she said of the car.

“If you’re glad, I’m glad.”

“So glad we agree. Well, I’ve got to buzz over to the Bellagio for a meeting of Wong Inc.”

“Now who’s upscale?”

“It’s not me. It’s my client’s star guest, of whom I’ve seen zilch since last night. Amelia Wong is also the likeliest target of the shooting spree, if anyone specific was. It’s time I made up for that oversight. Wish me luck.”

“I probably should wish you good chi.”

He didn’t have to look so amused and so scrumptious at once. “Chi, thanks!”

Temple hopped back into her car and revved out of the lot.

If she couldn’t imagine Janice Flanders riding a motorcycle, she could sure picture the guilty pleasure of riding shotgun in a Crossfire made for two.

Chapter 16

Chi for Two

At least Temple now had a car that made parking valets’s eyes come up double cherries when she abandoned it to their tender, gaspedal-goosing-up-the-hotel-parking-ramp care.

She was hardly persona plus grata at the Bellagio, but now she strode into the elegant arena, a girl gladiator to the marbleentry-hall-manner born.

The lavish Chihuly ceiling sculpture unfolded above her like the gigantic umbrella of blown glass craftsmanship it was, a great gleaming garden of exotic blooms never seen anywhere but in Alice’s Wonderland. Here in Las Vegas it was a true Hanging Garden of Hollywood Babylon.

The Bellagio had been the first Las Vegas hotel-casino to put Art with a capital Ah on the Las Vegas menu. Now newer megahotels like the Venice and the Paris rushed to mix high art with middlebrow tourism. It worked like Gangsters funky upscale limos … available on the cheap.

Much as Temple knew Las Vegas lows and highs in any area, she was eager to see a Bellagio celebrity-level suite, in which Amelia Wong and her Jimmy Choo shoes were sure to be ensconced.

The elevator whisked Temple higher than an elephant’s eye in no time. It disgorged her on plush eggplant carpeting so deep purple and thick that it consumed her vintage Lucite heels like a Midway sword swallower.

This was “puttin’ on the Ritz” … literally!

Temple slogged through the pure-wool loop jungle to a door whose Arabic numeral had been replaced by a Chinese character in brass. Or twentyfour-karat gold. Who knew?

Temple lifted the character-cum-knocker and let trendy greedom ring.

After a full minute, the door opened. Temple was admitted to the inner sanctum.

The doorman was the tall Swedish personal trainer, today a symphony in sweat-soaked gray warm-up suit with spaghetti—

string flaxen hair dripping onto his broad shoulders.

On either side of the door stood the suit-clad bodyguards. They still wore mirror shades. Temple had the antsy feeling of

getting the once-over … at least twice.

Beyond her stretched an expansive living room with furniture Maylords had never dreamed of. The odd Renoir or Degas highlighted a distant wall. The carpeting here was ankle-deep compared to the hall.

Temple prepared to mush forward into the lap of luxury. But first a bodyguard opted to detain her signature tote bag. It wasn’t that the tote bag was designer issue. It was just that she always carried one. If a life could be portable, Temple’s resided inside that tote bag.

So when an alien hand snagged it off her shoulder as she stepped into the suite, that was a moving violation in her book.

“He!” y

“Just checking the bag. Ma’am.”

Suit-‘n’-Sunglasses Man’s voice broadcast all the warmth and mechanical monotone personality of Hal, the 2001: A Space

Odyssey computer.

Ma’am! What a fighting word! Did this clone think she was over the hill or what?

Temple tugged back.

“‘Scuse,” came a gelato-smooth voice at ten o’clock high over her struggling shoulder.

Gelato was the Italian word for “ice cream,” and the dude who intervened wore the signature ice-cream suit of a Fontana brother. Also, his mirror shades were twenty degrees more wraparound than the bodyguard’s and bore the magic insignia

“Bulgari.”

Temple and the Fontana boys went way back. Temple’s mainstay client was the Crystal Phoenix Hotel, owned by Nicky Fontana, the white sheep son of a mob family. His nine twenty-something-and-beyond brothers were an astounding look-alike litter of looks to die for, old-country first names like Aldo and Emilio, jet-set tailoring, and vague occupations. They treated her with the elaborate and fond courtesy of a pack of Italian greyhounds riding shotgun for a Yorkshire terrier.

“Fontana Inc. will examine Miss Barr’s bag,” the unidentified Fontana told the anonymous guard. “Step this way, miss.