Unknown - 16_Cat_In_An_Orange_Twist

Where were you, anyway?”

Matt didn’t know how to say what he needed to without sounding terminally shallow. “I did stop by. So late that nothing was left but the orange peels. No wonder the place seemed deserted. I was late because … my booking agent called and there were a lot of dates he had to cross-check with me.”

“Speaking dates,” Temple said.

“That’s about the only kind I have time for these days.”

“I’m sounding stupid. Sorry. All I knew about Simon was how important he was to Danny. Seeing him dead, and thenhearing how afterwards … Who’d want to kill someone as amiable as Simon? He was new to the staff, everybody was. No time for murderous hatreds to develop.”

“Turning the place into a shooting gallery opening night sounds like a pretty murderous hatred.”

“That had to be someone outside Maylords. Literally. Given the elements inside and outside the store, one might suspect some sort of gay gang war. But a stab in the back is as up close and personal as murder can get. It doesn’t make sense.”

“It’s not sudden death’s job to make sense. It’s our job to make sense of it for ourselves. What does Kinsella think about this Maylords mess?” he asked.

She leaned back and away, shrugged. Temple was never offhand. He read the truth instantly.

“You haven’t told him yet, have you?”

“No,” she said. Shortly. Everything Temple did was shortly, but he liked it.

He stared, watching her momentary high color fade. It was odd how paper white redheads could go under stress. Even if they had few freckles, like Temple, stress brought out every one. Not that he objected. So she hadn’t told Mr. Undercover about this latest trauma? Max Kinsella had always been Temple’s partner in crime solving. Had always been her partner, period. Even when he had vanished for months without explanation, Temple’s loyalty remained hard-rock solid.

But this time she hadn’t told Max. This time Matt was on the inside, not the outside. How really great he felt about that sudden switch was a good indication of just how dangerous this was. Even Janice had nailed, in a split second, the subterranean sizzle between Temple and himself. None of his Las Vegas adventures, even when they had been somewhat lurid, had prepared him to confront something as simple as what he really wanted. And maybe act on it. Irrevocably. But … baby steps first.

“I suppose,” he said, treading lightly on the new and unstable ground he sensed had opened up between them, “Janice might have some insights. I suppose, you … we, owe it to Danny to find out.”

Temple’s head was nodding up and down like the little Chihuahua on a low-rider’s dashboard.

“I owe it to Danny to find out,” she mumbled, catching on to the one course she could act upon. “And I owe it to Maylords to do damage control and keep the bad publicity to a minimum. There’s got to be a way I can spin it and still stay honest, and somehow … save the day. I’ve got to go back, find out what was going on. I will do that. I owe it to my profession, and, most of all, I owe it to Danny.”

Matt remembered how Danny Dove had come to her rescue during a dangerous investigation a few months back.

And now he recalled his one glimpse of Simon Foster at the Maylords opening, who had seemed an innocent figure of light in an environment of dusk and shadow. Matt had sensed fear in the festive atmosphere. Something dark. Darkness he knew a bit about. And strong emotion, hidden agendas, lies. Not sex and videotape, though. He hadn’t gotten to that stage. Yet.

He didn’t particularly want to go gently into that dark night of ugly human behavior where hidden motives become unholy murder, that he knew.

But he would.

And so would Temple.

Neither of them could help it now, she for Danny’s sake, he for the sake of every seen and unseen freckle on her body.

Her teary interlude ended with a hiccough and an expression of true grit.

Janice was right. He thought it was adorable.

Uh-oh.

Chapter 27

All About May lords

Temple sat tapping her toes on the floor and tapping her pencil on the tabletop at Goldie’s Old-fashioned Cafeteria.

Matt had arranged a quickie tete-a-tete with Janice Flanders at the restaurant.

You can get anything you want… .

Trouble was, Temple didn’t want anything she could get from Janice Flanders.

Okay. Temple herself was a significant other of long standing. Almost two years. She shouldn’t care about other people’s

significant others. But in this case she did.

Temple was POed. Piqued off. Max had been incommunicado a bit too long. Sure, that was his usual MO. Modus operandi. But Temple was not a cop. She was his SO. She hated initials, especially the letters CR. As in Crusading Retrowoman. Temple hated shorthand, period. And she was beginning to feel that she’d gotten the short end of the stick from everyone she knew.

Even Matt.

Who’d gone and found himself somebody while she’d been trying to make the monogamous relationship she’d had work with one half of it often AWOL. Darn it! Max hadn’t told her about his shadow life until it suddenly drove him away. Now that he was back he kept promising they’d have a full-time relationship again. At first, Max’s hit-and-run surreptitious midnight visits had seemed Zorro-ish and swashbuckling. Now she just felt nervous when she wondered when, or if, he would come around.

Matt, though, was everywhere she turned lately, and she was getting way too used to that.

Maybe she was just jittery today because Janice reminded her of a college dean, one of those sensibly attired, eventempered female authority figures that always had you worrying that your Inadequacy Quotient was showing. Temple’s IQ was sky high, in both senses of the initials.

Temple eyed the sunlit door again. A tall figure darkened it. At least it wasn’t Molina, the other looming Mother Superior

figure in her life.

Wait! Wasn’t Janice a divorced mother of two? Hadn’t Temple heard Matt say something about Janice needing to support her kids? Both Molina and Flanders were mothers! And Temple was not. Temple was nowhere near being mother to anyt h

m o r e t h a n M i d n Lassie-Louie did i g h t not L need a mother!o u i e , a n d - s o h

Neither did Temple. She had a perfectly good, well-intentioned, overanxious mother far away in Minneapolis.

Still, maybe she was a bit oversensitive to the earth-mother type, because she wasn’t one and never would be.

When Janice finally saw Temple and approached the table, Temple had summed her up. “Junoesque” was the word to describe Janice. She wasn’t as tall as Molina, but looked as annoyingly competent. Her clothing, though, was both soft and sensuous, and arty. She looked at first sight like an Interesting Person.

Temple could see Matt responding to that benign maternal temperament. Heck, if Janice were Catholic, she would be

aperfect model for the Virgin Mary … after having been married with children in the twenty-first century.

Temple needed to find out if she was Catholic.

Janice loomed over the tabletop, setting various dishes on it without spilling anything, including the tall plastic glass of

iced tea.

Competent and coordinated. Drat!

“How are you?” Janice asked first, sounding concerned.

Of course. Temple had a front-row seat when the corpse had showed up.

“Fine,” Temple said. “We could have met someplace upscale, but I didn’t want to run into any Maylords execs, or the

Wong faction either.”

“This is fine. Suits my budget.” Janice easily pulled out the clumsy wooden chair Temple had been forced to wrestle into submission on her side of the table.