Unknown - 16_Cat_In_An_Orange_Twist

“Wow. So there’s precedent, then. And the rain of terrorizing bullets could have been from one of the people just fired?”

He shrugged. “You’re the girl detective. I’m just a grunt. All I’ve gotta be is copy-machine literate. You okay with that?” Temple nodded. “More than okay. I’m impressed. Simple is better than complicated. Don’t get caught.”

“Right. Like you wouldn’t be relieved if I did.” He walked away.

Even when he proved unexpectedly helpful, Rafi Nadir’s pervasive bad attitude, BA, hung over him like BO, body odor, canceling out any possible redeeming qualities. It made Temple yet more curious about his long-ago relationship with Molina. Apparently he was why she’d sworn off men. How mind-boggling to imagine the hard-edged homicide lieutenant Temple knewbeing young and vulnerable enough to associate with Nadir. Or had Nadir’s worst characteristics surfaced afterwards? “Miss Barr?” The voice was a whisper at the edges of her consciousness.

She looked around and saw the credenza pusher.

He reminded her of Sisyphus from the ancient Greek myth, forced to roll a rock up a hill and always losing ground before he reached the top. She seldom encountered anyone so obviously beaten down, especially not in Las Vegas, a city that rewarded chutzpah. Jerome was the quintessential Nice Guy metamorphosized into schmuck: a mild-mannered man, obviously, in his early thirties, but already his hairline was beating a swift retreat along with everything else in his life. He’d tried to compensate with a beard, but even it was thin and tentative.

“I’m Jerome. Jerome Johnson.” He looked around again, then stepped nearer. “I’d like to talk to you. I’m a … friend of

Matt’s.” He eyed her uneasily. “Too.”

“Talk? Sure. There’s the shopper’s caf� at the back of the store.”

Jerome shook his head, still looking around.

“Maybe the employee lounge would be more private.”

His watery gray gaze fixed on her face with horror. “Not there. Someplace out of the store, where nobody from here would

be likely to go.”

This desperation for privacy intrigued her, but his request also stumped her. Las Vegas was a city designed to attract tons of people everywhere. And what would be the opposite of a place that Maylords employees would hang out?

“There’s a Chunk-a-Cheez Pizza place off Flamingo. It’s noisy.”

“Noisy is good,” Jerry said. “I can get away at one P.M. I’ll see you there tomorrow.”

“Jer-ry,” came a clarion call from the lovely and cultured Beth Blanchard. “This credenza is six inches off-center, just like

your brain.”

Temple could hear the woman’s oncoming heels beating travertine like a drum.

Jerry winced an apology at her, then scurried to meet the enemy. She had to admire his dogged courage. Temple could hear Blanchard’s admonishing monologue as she slipped through the store the other way around and finally ended up at the entrance.

Something was indeed rotten in the not-so-merry old land of Maylords. The bland Kenny didn’t seem up to overseeing a seriously dysfunctional workplace, but evil can wear an unlikely face.

Speaking of dysfunction, the feng shui surrounding Amelia Wong reeked of superficiality and sycophants. Celebrity produced the worst kind of power, and attracted the worst sort of psychopath. That rain of bullets smacked of some sort of Wong involvement. Larger-than-life empress, big-time attacks.

Simon’s murder smacked of the intimate, the small: one-on-one. Neither act of violence made sense. Each was wholly destructive, with no hint of even something as constructive as personal gain underneath.

Well, that would have to be found out, Temple thought, surveying the clumps of sleek furniture grazing around the polished stone floor like elegant sheep in an upscale meadow. Where there is conspicuous consumption, there is probably conspicuous crime.

This was Temple’s scene for the moment, her little world for the term of her contract. Nothing was supposed to go wrong in it, and everything had. The publicity attracted was not positive but negative and lurid. It could not go on, or more and worse events might result. Temple eyed the deceptive stillness.

A faint orange fragrance lingered, overcoming even the discreetly savage smell of leather. Orange. Blossoms. The scent should have reminded her of weddings, if not her own, but she’d think about that tomorrow.

Instead, this scent had a citruslike, bitter undertone, like the rind of an orange. It reeked too much of the mysterious concoction Temple thought of as domestic Agent Orange, the ubiquitous scent morgues used to cover the smell of decay. Temple had taken a tour of the Vegas medical examiner’s facility when she was repping a medical convention. It had been a clinical yet creepy environment.

It occurred to Temple that this scent of gussied-up decay was oddly appropriate for Maylords.

Chapter 29

Undercover Cats

“This place is one big napatorium,” Ma Barker notes when I show her the illuminated display windows of Maylords Fine

Furnishings. “I always like a long Sunday nap.”

She is up and about, despite her injuries. I hijacked a bottled-water truck in North Las Vegas to bring her down-Strip in

style.

Now she is looking with lust upon all the upholstered furniture our kind cannot afford to dig our shivs into.

Many of us cannot afford even a Dumpster Dive Decor. “You know people who work inside this davenport dream?” she asks.

“A few,” I admit. “Most I do not know. And one of them could be a murderer.”

“Murderer-schmurderer,” Ma Barker notes with a sneer. “It is all a matter of point of view. Am I a murderer? I eat dead things. Oh! Sorry to offend your domesticated sensibilities, my boy. I guess I should say I eat … well-done-in meat. There. Is that better? That is what your human friends doevery day, and you do not wince when they discuss their eating habits.”

“Let us agree to disagree,” I say, “and admit to what disagrees with us.”

Ma Barker turns from gazing into the display windows to regard the sandy empty lot across the way.

“You are right, Grasshopper. Now that our population is stable we need a better class of empty lot.”

I am right! The old dame has admitted I am right!

“But this place will not stay empty for long,” she adds. “And window shopping will wear on a clan used to getting its claws

into life. Rodeo Drive is not for us.”

“Well, there is Three O’Clock’s place out by Lake Mead.”

“We are an urban community.”

“How about that Cloaked Conjurer’s spread, the residential joint behind the cemetery with the Big Boys on board, where you took out those rottweilers and I pasted the ears back on that she-devil Siamese?”

“That feisty little girlfriend of yours did the takedown that time, Grasshopper.”

“Ah, Ma Barker, we gotta talk about that.”

“It is all right, son. No need to be embarrassed about a steady girlfriend. I understand that a righteous dude must be responsible these days or the Behavior Police will nail his nuts to the wall. Boys cannot be boys the way they used to be, for the good of the species. And there is the age difference. Not that I have anything against that. I believe that little Louise has had the operative procedure. She is a modern girl. Yet she has accepted tradition enough to bear your name. You could have done worse. I might have liked grandkits now that my mothering days are over, but I understand.”

“I do not think you do.”

At which point she swats me firmly on the kisser. “No back talk. You are still a kit to me. Ma Barker knows best.”

Chapter 30