Unknown - 16_Cat_In_An_Orange_Twist

Maybe the mood of the country was growing less pugnacious and obvious.

Maybe her mood was appreciating the quiet versus the obvious.

Matt versus Max?

Why was she thinking like this? She was on her own here. Neither man was on the premises. Only the notion of them.

Which was more than enough for her.

They were all here:

The Maylords “fiber management couple. Kenny and Barb.” The thinning ranks of hot-shot (literally) decorators (already the predicted personnel slaughter had begun). Which meant the numbers of suspect disgruntled ex-employees had swelled. Amelia Wong and her now-familiar minions.

Jerome, still looking whipped despite the loss of his personal crown of thorns.

Janice, arms crossed as if she were daring the evening to be interesting.

A suite of potential Maylords clients, all middle-aged and prosperous looking, but not Steve Wynn level.

Chef Song, alert at the buffet table with his ultrasharp cleaver cocked in the crook of his white-coated arm.

And Danny Dove, pale and terse, but all business, as a choreographer-turned-inside-man should be. He’d played a key role in tonight’s setup, and Temple wanted him to witness the denouement he deserved.

Temple nodded imperceptibly at Song and Wong. Both had risen to the occasion and buried the hatchet (or cleaver) in service of the common good.

She was careful not to acknowledge Danny, but his presence reassured her about the informal, even secret, safety precautions she’d put into place Dancers were artists with rhythm, you know. She knew.

She didn’t see Rafi Nadir anywhere, but … at the rear, back and center, stood her angels with dirty faces: the Fontana brothers in almond-pale suits with a really butch five days’ growth of beard. White chocolate with a discreet drizzle of dark, to mean business: the beards and the invisible Berettas, of course.

Tonight the huge Plexiglas drum would turn … and turn.Hundreds, even thousands of hopefully-filled-out contest entry forms would tumble in a spin-dry cycle of luck.

Until Amelia Wong reached in a French-manicured hand and pulled out a plum. A winning entry. Then the orange Cadillac would have a home and all the hoopla and homicide at Maylords would be over.

Or would it?

This was her final night as Maylords’s Las Vegas PR rep. Temple was dressed to kill, but her handy Colt was still in police custody. Like they needed more firepower.

New Age music with an Asian accent wafted from the sound system, Enya in Mandarin. The delicate scent of freesias

reminded Temple of … yes, a funeral parlor.

While the Wong party and Maylords brass lined up for the usual unimaginative shots for the newspaper society pages, Temple edged as quietly as she could in high heels down the beige travertine road.

Her weight was on the balls of her feet. She glimpsed her passing self in lacquered ebony cabinet doors, in glints of mirror, on polished brass.

No one else was moving among the maze of model rooms, dimly lit with accent lights for the evening. Everything looked

like home, if you’d spent $40,000 per room.

Temple moved along, her soles scraping ever so softly on the polished stone floor. There were rumors of ghosts. Some of the departing employees hadn’t been forced out by discovering Maylord’s hidden cut-and-slash method of management; some had been unnerved by the two murders on the premises and quit.

Temple knew she would see Beth Blanchard’s body spinning as idly as a soft-sculpture mobile for a long, long time in her nightmares.

She gazed at the hanging art, so oddly static in its usual places now that Beth’s nervous, commanding energy was gone, now that she didn’t need to endlessly undo others’ good work simply to put her own stamp on the whole place.

She had been an obnoxious woman, so much more eminently killable than the likable Simon Foster. Yet something linked the two murders, Temple was convinced.

No one would kill the sweetest guy and the sourest woman on the staff just because … because sweet and sour was a Chinese condiment.

And Amelia Wong had something to do with it. What a murderous triangle: A gay man and two presumably straight women, one an uppity employee, the other a media diva. Surely the murderer made it a quadrangle. But who?

Temple couldn’t even hear the echo of the droning speeches now. She was deep within the Maylords maze.

Alone. Accompanied by ghosts.

Her steps faltered.

Something pale moved in one of the vignettes.

Temple stepped onto the cut-plush wool of a model room carpet to muffle her steps. She edged into the slim cover of a

pillar of pooled velvet draping the four-poster bed.

As her eyes adapted to the low mood lighting she saw a pale-suited man moving in Simon Foster’s Art Deco vignette. Moving and … moving pictures.

It was … Simon Foster. The casually perfect highlighted and styled hair, the impeccably cut suit. A ghost in Gucci, moving Ert� prints from one position to another. Over and over again, as if perpetually restoring what. Beth Blanchard had wrought, over and over again.

Temple held her breath.

His arms raised as if worshiping something unseen. The Ert� glided down onto its hook and held. The next one was hung. He stepped back, presenting a welltailored suit back of featherweight wool blend with Italian double vents at the sides. Maybe not Gucci. Maybe Zegna. Still expensive.

And then the man again approached the false wall, lifted his arms and took down one print, then another. And switched their places. Over and over again.

His movements mimicked an automaton. Down, back. Up, switched. Step back. View. Pick up and change. A strange eerie box waltz with the dead. With dead intentions. Change and restoration, like the seasons. Death and rebirth.

Temple was too mesmerized by it to move.

Someone else wasn’t.

Another pale figure suddenly bloomed in the vignette. One moment it wasn’t there, in another it was.

Its pale arm was raising too. Just one. It needed to do nothing as symmetrical as lift a framed print from a hook. It was poised for a downstroke. This arm was armed. Something dark and thin glinted in one pale fist at the end of one pale sleeve.

Ghosts were murdering ghosts?

Temple’s muscles tightened as she prepared to test dream with reality.

But another pale suited figure multiplied in the dark vignette. And another. Another. A gaggle of ghosts.

Temple’s fingers tightened on the top of her weapon-empty evening bag. Her role was decreed. Witness.

She heard grunts, explosive breaths muttering four-letter words.

“Got the bastard,” someone muttered behind her.

She turned. It was Rafi Nadir, staring toward the scene as tensely as she was.

“It’ll be your capture,” she said. “I’m the witness.”

“That oughta fry Her Lieutenant Highness’s kneecaps. Okay. Confess. Who is it?”

“I think we can move in. He looks pretty unconscious.”

“I figure one of those freaky Fontana brothers knows the Vulcan neck pinch, is what I think.”

Another pale-suited figure vaulted into view, then joined them in gingerly approaching the scene of the almost-crime.

Danny Dove.

“Who is it?” he said. “I want to know who it is.”

“I’m with you, brother,” Rafi said. “I don’t like being down-sized to backup.”

“Amen.” Danny sounded grimmer than he ever had. “But it’s probably just as well for my future liberty.”

Temple, flanked by her Odd Couple of attendants, was as deeply curious. She’d figured out why, but not who. Although she had her suspicions.

The plethora of pale suits so typical in sunny Las Vegas confused matters in this pseudoroom.

One Ert� print hung on the wall. The other leaned against it.