Unknown - 16_Cat_In_An_Orange_Twist

Just pretend this is an airport security station.”

Temple couldn’t believe it. A long gilt-slathered Renaissance table sat to the right of the door, and on it she was expected

to deposit her bag for inspection.

“Fontana Inc.? Come on!” she whispered to the anonymous Fontana brother, desperately seeking his name in her memory bank.

“So sorry, dear lady. We have been hired by Wong Inc. to assist her usual muscle … I mean, security forces, of course.”

“Of course, of course, unless it’s Mr. Eduardo! What are you guys doing here? Why are you searching me?”

“We are assisting. I will delicately paw through your tote bag enough to satisfy the brutes at the door. Also to protect any highly personal items you may carry from the glare of public revelation.”

Whichever Fontana brother it was, and Temple couldn’t ID him through the wine-dark Aegean shades, he did indeed tiptoe his fingertips through the contents of her bag. “Hmmm.”

The Reese’s peanut butter cup wrapper. Ooops! Two of them. Temple cringed.

“Aha.”

A bar stub from Les Girls strip joint on Paradise. She knew the all-female management, for Pete’s sake. For Patty’s sake, actually. It was a feminist strip club. Sort of. Honest. You had to have been there.

An item dangled from a small, steel-ball chain. Pepper spray. “I’ll have to confiscate this for the duration of your visit,” he

said. Sternly.

“Gee, I thought the Asian community liked hot peppers.” “Cooked, not carried,” was the terse reply.

Her defensive canister disappeared into a supernaturally flat Fontana brother suitcoat pocket. Amazing how many loaded Berettas the same pockets could conceal!

“Listen,” she whispered. “We are sympatico here.”

“Exactly. That is why I do not brandish … this.”

He flashed her computerized calorie counter before palming it politely and adding it to the pocket that held her pepper spray. “Discretion is a Fontana brother’s middle name.”

“Really, I thought it was Turncoat.”

“I will turn out my coat pockets and return your … goods, intact, when you leave.”

Temple shook her head. Amelia Wong must be superparanoid if she had beefed up her security forces with locals. It was high time she herself had an actual conversation with the feng shui Wonder Woman. Temple wondered how many layers it would take to peel this onion.

She quickly found out. Baylee, looking haggard for a blonde, passed Temple to her brunette coworker, Pritchard Merriweather, whose fatigue simply made her look hard-nosed, like Molina.

“Asking you to this strategy session was a mere courtesy,” Pritchard said. “You might have some slight insight on the local situation. Seeing Ms. Wong personally is impossible.”

“Nevertheless.” Temple paused after delivering a word that was almost longer than she was. At least she had fixed Pritchard’s attention. “I’m the only one here with local policeconnections. Positive police connections,” she added, glancing to the uncooperative Fontana brother who shall remain nameless simply because she couldn’t ID him.

“You have positive police connections?”

“Positively. Perhaps ‘Homicide’ strikes a chord with you?” “You know powers that be in Homicide?”

It was really called the Crimes Against Persons Unit now, but “Homicide” had such a more lethal ring to the uninitiated.

“Merely the lieutenant overseeing the case, Molina by name. You did hear that name mentioned? And Alch and Su, the investigating detectives … old acquaintances. Need I say more?”

Temple certainly hoped not, because this story of hers was like unblenderized California orange juice made from

tangerines: pulp fiction.

The word “Homicide” had come in handy. Pritchard shattered along the nerve lines.

“Ms. Wong has just finished her Zen Pilates routine. She may be mellow enough … now … to speak with an outsider. I’ll knock, but I don’t guarantee an answer.”

Temple nodded, following Pritchard through an enormous dining room and down an endless hall lined with Great Masters to a set of double doors wide enough to admit Jonah’s whale. Pritchard’s bony knuckles rapped. Once. Twice. Thrice. Thrice always worked in fairy tales and it did here. “Yes?” came a high, imperious voice.

“Temple Barr, Maylords local PR rep, wishes to speak with you. I know it’s early and-”

“The efficiently compact redhead,” came the clipped voice from beyond the door. “Fascinating hair color, if it’s natural. Red

is the color of power. Our affairs could use an injection of power. Send her in.”

Pritchard lifted her eyebrows to indicate the high level of honor bestowed on Temple, then turned one doorknob and pushed Temple through the crack in the doors, rather like tossing a virgin sacrifice into the yawning crater of a volcano.

“Pray you’re not a Miss Clairol redhead,” Pritchard advised in farewell. “Ms. Wong loathes fakes.”

Temple, genuine to her roots and often decrying it, swept past the statuesque dark guardian goddess called Pritchard into Amelia Wong’s lair.

The first thing to hit her was sound: falling water and clashing crystals and temple bells.

The next was the dim light. Shadow.

The third was smell. A delicate scent of … orange blossoms. Odd. Temple saw nothing to give off that scent. She smelled something else, a discreet incense of warmed underarm deodorant. And something intangible.

Amelia Wong, she realized, was afraid. Deathly afraid.

Oddly, that bucked Temple right up. If someone as rich and powerful as feng shui’s Wizard of Ahs was cowering behind a metaphysically protective curtain, maybe she, Temple, had the right shui and the right stuff to put things, well, right.

She’d done it before.

Ms. Wong, wearing a pale jade satin pantsuit, sat on a crimson couch that reminded Temple of Matt’s vintage model of

similar hue.

She looked youthfully delicate in the shadowed light, yet as stiff as a Chinese tapestry. Scared was the Western word that came to mind. Scared stiff.

She looked up as Temple entered.

“In the holy mountains of Tibet,” she said, “in the mystical mountains of Tibet, lies the inspiration for the Western fairy tale called Shangri-La. You know of what I speak?.”

Temple nodded. She’d seen the Ronald Colman movie once, ages ago. And it had been ages old when she’d seen it. And the mystical name had since been appropriated for stage use by one of what were amounting to Temple’s many mortal enemies.

“Sit.”

The only seat anywhere near Amelia Wong was a pile of three silk pillows, one purple, one orange, and one yellow.

Temple kicked off her heels and sat. She sank into down feathers like she sank into a Gangsters limo’s leather upholstery.

One was Eastern luxe, one Western, and they were more kissing cousins than they knew.

Amelia Wong continued to speak, her voice high and strained, and yet meditative.

“It’s shameful that the current Chinese government persecutes the Tibetans. Governments, Western or Eastern, always persecute the philosophical, the visionary.”

Temple remained silent.

“In Tibet, where once the Dalai Lamas thrived before being driven out, there was a breed of temple guard dog: small, longhaired, tenacious. It was forbidden that their divine breed be allowed to proliferate anywhere else. Then, in the 1930s, a Westerner smuggled two out. A breeding pair.”

Temple felt herself tense. Once again the Ugly American had ripped off an alien culture.

“The culprit,” Amelia Wong went on, “was British.”

Humph! A Brit at the bottom of it. So there, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair and Bonnie Prince Charles!