Unknown - 15_Cat_In_A_Neon_Nightmare

She returns the favor to my tummy while Louise makes audible growling noises of disgust.

Despise my methods if you must, but they are effective. I am now poised to pick up every nuance of the ensuing conversation and am getting a professional-level massage at the same time. Try that, Mike Hammer! I have never gone in for the hard-knocks school of private investigation. If it is that private, it should at least be pleasant.

“You will never guess who was just here,” Miss Temple is continuing. “Molina!” she tells him right out before he can exercise his guesser even a little.

Miss Temple is to information dispersal what Exxon is to an oil spill.

“No, it wasn’t about your set-to last night. Not at all. It seems she thinks I know another filthy rotten murderer. In fact, she’s so hot on this new suspect she has forgotten all about little you.”

Mr. Max does not cotton to rivals in any area, even bad ones. I can hear his basso grumble over my low-level purr.

“No, this time she is after Matt. Yeah, Matt. For murder. You know that little enterprise that apparently half of Las Vegas was aiding and abetting him in? Operation Call Girl? Well, the call girl had a big fall and now Molina’s trying to figure out a way to keep Matt from being accused of her murder, as he looks like the last person to see her alive.

“No, I do not think he did it! But neither is he helping out Molina with lots of alibis and denials. And none of you-none!—told me about Kitty the Cutter’s turning stalker and forcing Matt into a corner. We need to find and expose that psycho before she gets more people killed. Why ‘we’? Because she hates you most of all and if she can do this to Matt, who she never even knew from Adam until a few months ago, think what she could cook up for you. Or me.”

Then Miss Temple does something uncharacteristic. She leans back into the sofa and listens. And listens.

I can learn nothing from good listeners, only world-class talkers.

Miss Midnight Louise yawns and casts me a bored glance.

I realize that I no longer look good.

Miss Temple rises, phone still clapped to ear. She heads for her bedroom. “I will get over there as soon as I can,” she is saying.

I know she will change clothes first. She has not exactly had time to concoct a wardrobe today.

Miss Louise gives her ruff a lick and a promise and leaps down to the floor. She is even hotter to trot than my Miss Temple.

I give up my Nero Wolfe spot and reluctantly push myself upright. “It looks like we need to do some fieldwork,” I admit. “My usual sources will be going in for recriminations before they get down to business.”

“So we head for—?” Miss Louise is already at the French doors, gazing over her fluffed shoulder at me. She would be as cute as a cricket were it not for the expression of hunt-lust on her piquant face.

“The Goliath Hotel. We need to do some firsthand scouting on the scene of the crime.”

I leap up and loosen the latch with one practiced blow from my mighty paw. The door bounces ajar and Miss Louise noses through it without mewing so much as a thank-you for my doorman service.

That is what a dude gets for being a gentleman toward the weaker sex.

Chapter 9

The Man That

Got Away

Temple gathered several admiring, and a few envious, looks as she spurted her new red Miata through the clogged Strip traffic, the wind currying her hair. All she needed was a long white scarf and she would be the Isadora Duncan of the twenty-first century, prima donna dancer and unintentional suicide.

The thought slowed her down to a decorous forty miles an hour even though her mind was still supercharged.

Little did they know that her apparently carefree spin to Max’s house was a matter of life and death.

She hadn’t had a minute to calm down and consider things. First she got a case of pre-breakfast bad-news indigestion from Molina, who she knew was an enemy, followed by multiple doses of kept-in-the-dark-itis from everyone she thought was a friend.

Even with her thoughts in chaos, she could see that the tenuous relationships of a number of people, all of whom she knew and some of whom she loved or liked, wereteetering on the brink of a disaster engineered by a common but elusive enemy.

On the drive she had a chance for the first time to think about the victim. “A call girl.” It conjured images from B movies of faceless women with cynical smiles as shallow as their cleavage was deep. Bit-part players who were there only as a fleeting sex/love interest/motivator for the weary PI or cop, for a bit of smacking around by the mob boss, for dying hard and too soon to earn little more than minimum pay until the next film.

She just couldn’t picture Matt in that scene. That desperate.

But then she hadn’t really seen or been told what was going on for some time.

But a call girl? Paid-for sex with a sleazy stranger? If that wasn’t a mortal sin in his church, what was? It made no sense. Or … maybe it did. A call girl was already damned, according to strict religions. Was sex with a sinner less damning than sex with a—?

Temple decided not to mull that question while she was driving when she almost wandered into the same lane that had been staked out by a Humvee. Oops!

Sex and Matt Devine didn’t make any sense, period. She’d never seen anyone who took it as seriously as he did. Kitty O’Connor had to have gotten under his skin with a lot more than a razor blade.

She squealed onto Max’s street, then braked fast to avoid attracting, er, attention.

She parked four houses away, looked around, then hiked to his door, nervous and impatient and not feeling at all inconspicuous.

Max was there waiting to open it. He admitted her into the high-security inner sanctum that this former home of Orson Welles and Gandolph the Great had become.

Its interior shadows felt like an oasis from the relentless Las Vegas sunshine and blazing cynicism.

Temple leaned against the closed door behind her and breathed deep sighs of relief. Max took her hands. Their warmth made her realize how cold her fingers were.

“You’ve had a rough morning,” he said.

“It was a rough night, then … Molina first thing.”

“I can’t imagine anything worse than waking up to Molina. I should have stayed.”

“No.” Temple pushed her sinking spine off the temporary brace of Max’s solid-steel front door. “She would have found you. She walked right into my bedroom.”

“I bet. Nosy Parker.” He noticed her confusion and laughed. “British expression for a snoop. Come on. Let’s try breakfast sans Molina. I haven’t had much sleep since I left you either. I’m having a case of what I think is called writer’s block.”

Temple followed him down the house’s dark halls to the kitchen. The place was a quintessential magician’s residence: a maze of dim passages that opened onto strange, large, enthralling rooms.

The kitchen was one of them. State-of-the-art, filled with stainless steel food machines with a canopy of contrasting copper-pan warmth above. Like a sunset-metal sky.

Max whisked up a giant omelet in one of the copper pans and iced it with hot raspberry chipolte sauce. Goblets of cranberry juice shone like jewels as Temple and Max settled on stools at the huge island unit to eat.

Temple hooked her heels over the highest rung of her stool and ingested a tricolor of pepper strips, bland eggs, and mushrooms, all heated up by the sweet-spicy sauce.

For a moment everything ugly drew back, like reality does when you feel about to faint, or to go down the biggest dip on a roller-coaster.

“So … writer’s block? You?” she asked. Maybe jeered a little. It wasn’t often she was expert at something and he was the amateur.