Unknown - 16_Cat_In_An_Orange_Twist

“You’re such a romantic.”

“Even if it’s only you and Molina.”

“Electra! That’s outrageous.”

“Not the way things are going around here. Give my regards to whichever phantom you see first. Adios, Louie.”

With that Electra let herself out. Temple considered shouting denials after her, but rose, went to the French doors, and opened one onto the balcony patio.

Her plants looked a little droopy. The pool, kept filled year round, glistened like a huge, wet, emerald-cut aquamarine in the

sunlight.

Now Temple was seeing phantoms: Matt and the strikingly described woman Temple had never met, but who had bedeviled the lives of two men who were important to her.

Electra had stirred up a lot of ghosts in the process of complaining about them.

Temple turned to regard her familiar rooms, running reels of her memory back and forth, pausing on certain indelible

pictures.

Max’s fingerprints were all over this scene. On the stereo system, in the kitchen, the bedroom. They’d lived together here for six ecstatic crazy-in-love months, flirting with marriage but not quite saying so. Temple moved suddenly across the room, causing Louie to scramble upright at full alert.

In her bedroom she went straight to the row of louvered closet doors.

The soaring chords of Max’s favorite Vangelis CDs seemed to ricochet like musical bullets off the walls.

Digging in the deepest, darkest corner, she pulled out the last remaining performance poster of the Mystifying Max, the one Lieutenant Molina had insisted on borrowing after she’d deduced, merely from the blue-toned sweaters he’d left behind, that Max’s compelling cat-green eyes were contact-lens enhanced.

It always galls to have an enemy tell you something you should have known in the first place.

Temple unrolled the glossy poster. Max the professional magician emerged, the top of his thick dark hair first, his devilishly arched Sean Connery the Younger eyebrows, then the phoney but compelling green eyes. He was wearing his trademark black silk-blend turtleneck sweater, long-fingered hands posed like sculpture on each opposite arm. Max was six four and sinewy, as strong and lean as steel cable, an aesthetic athlete. He wasn’t handsome in a classical sense, but he didn’t have to be. Sexy was good enough.

And for an all-too-few long, loving months, it had seemed that he was all hers.

Temple let the poster roll up like an old-fashioned window shade. Now you see him. Now you don’t.

One week he was admitting her into his undercover life, like a partner. The next week … vanished again, without ever leaving town. Something had happened on the night Matt’s stalker had died pursuing Max’s car. Something that was taking Max away from her. Something that, if it kept on, might be taking her away from Max.

She’d seen fire and she’d seen rain, and she’d stood by him. Electra had just reminded Temple how hard it was to stand by a phantom. It had been that way after Max had first disappeared, when big, bullying Lieutenant Molina had badgered Temple to crack like the small-boned, petite woman she could be mistaken for.

tT d!ehtasH i f -mah ow t nevE hadn’t done that.

No, Temple’s key problem wasn’t Las Vegas’s hardest-boiled female homicide lieutenant. It was Max. Always and ever the charmer, always and ever impossible to pin down.

Temple put the rolled-up poster back in the corner of her closet, her fingers brushing soft black jersey in the dark. The Dress. The rather out-of-date dress. For a vintage clothing aficionado like Temple, nothing was ever really out of date. Not even the stuff in her refrigerator that she always seemed to get around to only past the expiration date.

The Dress. Max had been back again, then, in Las Vegas and in her bed. But. Matt Devine had been there when Max hadn’t, and something got cooking there. He’d seemed so safe for a white widow (with a significant other gone, but not legally pronounced dead) like Temple: ex-priest, handsome as hard candy, nice as someone else’s big brother, and too ethical to take advantage of any woman. Perfect prom date. No unromantic groping. No danger.

Except that one time, after his vile stepfather’s funeral. Funerals always let out the demons. The phantoms of the past.

On her sofa. Temple walked back into the living room. That one. Broad daylight. Matt’s fingers on the long bright hard row of black buttons up the center of That Dress.

Something happening. Oh, very definitely. And definitely to her taste. His too.

Temple sank into the cushions, reliving those-ha! Bring on the film noir flacks-“forbidden moments.” She could sure see why they were forbidden. Way too addictive.

So. Did Matt really mean it? Feel it? Of course. But did he want to? Maybe not. Did she? Maybe not … oh, yeah. But she was spoken for. And very nicely too, when Max was around to speak for her.

But he hadn’t been, not lately.

And he hadn’t told her why. A poster is a poor excuse for a man, even a charismatic one.

Temple squinched down in the cushions and picked up her cell phone from the coffee table. She would try calling Max one more time today.

Her phone bleeped at her and shot a little message graphic into her heart.

Message. From Max? All her internal mutterings faded. At last.

She pressed the right buttons and then a couple wrong ones, and groused aloud and tried again, putting the phone to her

ear.

“Hey, Little Red.” Max’s baritone vibrated through the earpiece. If you could sell that on the Web via spam … “Sorry we’ve been playing phone tag. That is definitely not what I’d like to play with you. Too much has come up for phones. I’ll be in touch when I can. Ciao.”

Something soft and sensuous stroked her forearm. Temple looked down. Midnight Louie had silently lofted up next to her.

His long black tail was just barely swiping her skin.

Temple gritted her teeth.

Electra had been right. Midnight Louie was the most constant and attentive male in her Circle Ritz life these days.

Did relationships have an expiration date too? And how far past that date did you dare nibble on the past without getting poisoned?

Chapter 2

Tooth and Nail,

Feng and Claw

“Well, Louie, what do you think? Am I feng enough to satisfy the Queen of Shui-ba?”

Huh? Since when did my daring and darling roommate, Miss Temple Barr, consult me on fashion matters?

I am a gentleman of the old school, from my polished nails to my formal black tie and tails that are a blend of Fred Astaire and gangsta record mogul.

One can never go wrong wearing black. Perhaps Miss Temple’s crisis of confidence in the mirror is because she is

wearing silver.

I do love those burnished sea shades, though. The memory of glints of gold and silver-the shiny-scaled koi that swim in them-reminds me of my dear old dad, Three 0’-Clock Louie. He retired to Vegas a while back from a Pacific Northwest salmonfishing boat.

There is nothing golden-or fishy-about my Miss Temple, however. She has red-hot cinnamon fur, yum-yum, and baby-big

steel blue eyes. She also is heir to the sad human fate of wearing a union suit that is all skin and virtually no hair, like the unfortunate Sphinx breed of my own cat kind. Today Miss Temple is wearing a short skirt and skimpy sweater set in gray-silver. This is a knockout with her fur color but the outfit does make her look about twelve years old, always a worry for a petite public relations woman who has to elbow her own way to the fore of a competitive profession.

Miss Temple tries to pull her skirt an inch or two below her kneecap, which I agree is an ugly human attribute and hairless to boot.

The ploy does not work, though I have to admit the legs below the kneecap are pretty elegant despite their unfurred condition.