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Max just shook his head at Danny’s loss, frowned at her description of the Maylords house politics, and laughed at the extra-virgin oil incident. Not even Max could take a gay biker gang that seriously. Maybe that was a mistake.

As comforting as it was to be consulting with Max again, he never offered to see her back to the Circle Ritz.

He held her in the entryway, and kissed her six ways from Sunday.

But he never asked her to stay.

Temple left in a slight wine glow that was rapidly waning as the hearty sandwich absorbed it. Talk about an anticlimax!

She’d writhed with guilt over smooching Matt in the hall, tossed and turned herself out of the bed in the middle of the night. Rushed over to Max’s place to confirm their scintillating couplehood, only to find Max acting like he was the ex-priest, not Matt!

Oh, he had sympathized, encouraged, theorized, but he had never volunteered to barge back into her life, protect her honor, and solve the crimes.

He had pled the exhaustion of the book, of his recent workout. He had not taken advantage of the visit to make love to her. He had never, for a moment, acted like the old Max. At all. She had left the house wined and dined, and somewhat pet-ted, but suspiciously unfulfilled.

This was a first. And not a good one.

But maybe she had learned what she had cow here to find out, after all.

Chapter 48

Dry Red Wine

Max leaned his weight against the shut front door, both ensuring its security and regretting the fact that it was shut more

than anything in his life since Ireland. “Lad?”

The voice behind him was tentative, almost cajoling. He sighed and turned to face Gandolph.

The old man’s smooth fleshy face was riddled with wrinkles of anxiety.

“I apologize, Max. I’d no right to bring my sorry dead skin back into your life, to interfere with … the young and the living.”

“Save it, Garry.” Max pushed himself off the closed door, off the recent, regrettable past. “That sounds like the title of a

TV soap opera: The Young and the Living. What does that make us? The Old and the Dead?”

“In my case, yes.”

“Well, you’re not dead yet.”

Gandolph chuckled. “Your position on my age is noted. Seriously, Max, she’s a lovely, lovely girl, inside and out. She’d have to be to win you from your self-imposed emotional exile. I would have found a discreet way to exit the house, believe me. There was no need to turn the lady out. Our cause may be noble, but it doesn’t require martyrdom of such a personal nature.”

“It’s not only your being here, and the need to keep your survival secret from the Synth. All that damn, difficult physical catching up on my acrobatic and magical skills. I don’t think I could do her justice tonight, and if Temple deserves anything of me, it’s justice.”

“Nonsense. You young men are so self-exacting. Women rarely demand as much as we believe they ought to. And you love her. That’s why you’re too proud to let her see any hint of weakness on your part. Pride, not weakness. And yet, pride is weakness.”

“Oh, shut up, Garry. You’re a great magician, but a lousy Ann Landers.”

“I believe she also is dead.”

“Does it matter? Her work, her column, goes on. And so does yours.”

“I hate having to stay undercover, letting you take all the risks.”

“If I bust the Synth, neither of us will have to worry about staying undercover again. Ever.”

“You’re now that convinced that they’re the key to the past, and our future?”

Max nodded. “Want a sandwich? There are plenty of fixings in the kitchen.”

“Sandwich?” Garry sniffed. Derisively. “Your young lady is a sweet little thing, but she has no culinary skills whatsoever.”

Max laughed. “You know what? Frankly, my dear Gandolph, I don’t give a damn.”

They retreated to the kitchen anyway, where Max chatted with his mentor while Garry whipped up an exotic hot dish that soothed his own soul and that Max had no appetite to taste.

Instead, Max drank way too much of costly dry, red wine.

Chapter 49

House of Dearth

Temple was emotionally exhausted the next day. (She certainly wasn’t physically exhausted. Wonder why not?) First she had to buzz by Maylords. Damage control. Not even the best PR ace could put a good face on a double homicide on the same scene.

The place looked deserted, and any staff she ran into wouldn’t meet her eyes. It wasn’t her. It was the miasma of suspicion and anxiety haloing Maylords like a New Age aura.

She met with Kenny Maylord and Mark Ainsworth. One had no clue, the other was arrogantly indifferent.

“We need to concentrate on the Wong factor,” she told them. “Amelia is a symbol of interior peace, of spacial harmony.

We need to emphasize her shtick. Maybe another blessing ceremony. I don’t know! We’ve got to get beyond reality.”

“Amen,” Ainsworth sneered. “I guess all PR people can offer is pie in the sky.”

“It’s better than Murder in the Model Rooms, which is what you’ve got now.”

“We’ve,” Kenny Maylord said, looking both pouty and threatening. “We’ve.”

“I guess,” Temple said, “in the design field you figure out early that you can’t make a silk purse out of a boar’s ear.”

“That’s wrong,” Kenny said, vaguely, because he hadn’t quite tumbled to how or why.

“I don’t do sows,” Temple said, and left the meeting.

She knew, though, she had a tough obligation she couldn’t dodge: paying a call on Danny Dove. She hadn’t confronted feeling like a third wheel on a gay community bicycle built for two, and Danny deserved better of her.

He would not be back at work yet, but Temple knew where he lived. The paper had done a big feature spread on the place only months ago.

How sad to realize now the obvious reason for the article about the usually superprivate Danny Dove. His newly redecorated house. Decor by that dazzling young talent, Simon Foster. Temple hadn’t known about Simon’s place in Danny’s personal life when she read how he had transformed Danny’s vintage house into a contemporary showplace. Now she understood why the sudden publicity peek into Danny’s lifestyle.

The article wasn’t about Danny and his wealth and success but the little-known Simon, and his talent and designing future. Danny had opened the doors to his life only to get Simon’s interior designs some local recognition, and clients.

The Las Vegas opening of an upscale design/furnishing operation like Maylords must have seemed like manna from heaven for Simon’s future.

Temple shook her head as she guided the Miata down the winding streets of the city’s most established area where huge, two-story houses dated to past decades. These old places were the estates that time had forgot.

Nowadays, Las Vegas personalities who liked privacy would buy them quietly and redo them. And Simon would have had a whole neighborhood to reinvent.

Temple loved vintage architecture-Mediterranean, provincial French, Italian villa. She had cruised by this area morethan

once just to glimpse the stately terra-cotta tile and slate roofs.

So she knew right where Danny’s place was. Because it was her favorite. Or at least the roofline was: ’40s moderne, all angles and no visible roof at all, just pure geometry in blazing white stucco with black marble trim.

She didn’t know if Danny would welcome visitors yet, even her.

Most of these homes hid behind high solid walls. Danny’s was a ten-foot-high wash of stucco reminiscent of Siegfried and Roy’s poured-concrete compound, a Taj Mahal built to house themselves and their regal white tigers and lions, and now a memorial to an outstanding career cut short.