(anthology)

IRENE ADLER ADVENTURES

Good Night, Mr. Holmes

The Adventuress* (Good Morning, Irene)

A Soul of Steel* (Irene at Large)

Another Scandal in Bohemia* (Irene’s Last Waltz)

Chapel Noir

Castle Rouge

Femme Fatale

Spider Dance

Marilyn: Shades of Blonde (anthology)

Carole Nelson Douglas and Nitpickers

The after-dinner crowd was exiting the Crystal Phoenix Hotel and Casino’s revolving rooftop restaurant, the Crystal Carousel.

Temple and Matt still stood at the head table, watching the last stragglers file up to Temple’s aunt Kit and Aldo Fontana farther down the table, congratulating them on their surprise engagement announcement. The nine bachelor Fontana brothers had been a Vegas institution until Temple’s novelist aunt from Manhattan, sixty and scintillating and devotedly single all her life, had hit town and hit the eldest Fontana brother, Aldo, “in the eye like a big pizza pie,” as the old song went. That’s amore.

The dinner had celebrated Temple’s public relations triumph for her employers at the Phoenix: solving the murders at the Red Hat Sisterhood convention and saving the hotel from Bad Press Hell.

“We still could have said something about us,” Matt whispered to her.

That “something” would have been the surprise announcement that Miss Temple Barr, Vegas’s premier freelance PR woman and occasional crime-solver, was engaged to be married to Mr. Matt Devine, more widely known as “Mr. Midnight” on a syndicated late-night radio counseling show.

This engagement had been more than a year in coming, since Matt, an ex-priest, had first come to Vegas searching for an abusive stepfather. He had subleased a condo in the same building Temple had lived in with her significant other, the missing magician, Max Kinsella, aka the Mystifying Max.

A lot had happened in a year. Max had returned after almost a year away, but Temple had already sympathized with the handsome ex-priest trying to settle old family matters and exchange his longtime celibacy for an enduring new love.

It had looked like Temple might be the one until Max—Temple’s earlier, tempestuous love—had turned up again. But Max was a man with a secret mission. A counterterrorism operative since his teens, a man with a price on his head was in no position to maintain a serious relationship, even with Temple trying her best to warm the embers of her old love.

Now, Max was mysteriously missing. Again. Now, Matt and Temple had committed the sin of full emotional and physical commitment. She had the engagement ring. All that was left was to arrange the church ceremony, blessing and legalizing their love.

Temple the woman could live with that. She would always love Max and wish him well, but a girl had to move on. Matt was a dream of a man, not only attractive, but decent and caring in the extreme. And she’d secretly wanted him, bad, for a long time. Ever since Max, for good secret agent reasons, had abandoned her so long for her own safety.

Temple the crime-solver chafed at the idea that Max could vanish for good and all this time, and she’d never know why. Or where. Or whether he was alive or dead.

Matt squeezed her hand. “A Sacajawea dollar for your thoughts.” He knew where her feminist sentiments lay. But he didn’t need to know her still-raw regrets about Max.

She needed to tell Max her decision herself. She needed to say good-bye.

“Hey.” A couple was coming up to address her and Matt, not the official lovebirds.

Some couple. It was Lieutenant C. R. Molina’s two top homicide detectives, the seasoned Morrie Alch and the petite but persistent Merry Su.

Su sparkled in her black sequin-trimmed riding jacket and thigh-high-slit slim black skirt. She looked like the Dragon Lady and had been acting that way toward Temple since Molina had asked the PR woman, and not Su, to go undercover as a teenager at a reality TV show shot in Las Vegas, on which Molina’s teen daughter was a contestant.

Alch, always the diplomat, drew Matt into conversation and edged away as if glad to escape his partner’s company for a bit. Su was a tenacious detective, but she could be abrasive. Temple understood that. Short, petite women like her and Su had to compensate somehow. Temple did it with an extensive high-heel collection. Su did it with nerve.

“I suppose,” Su said, “you miss your pal Lieutenant Molina being here.”

“Hardly my pal,” Temple said. She and the tall, no-nonsense lieutenant had wrangled over Max and why he went missing and whether he’d committed an unsolved murder on the way out of town for more than a year.

Still. She would have loved Molina being in the audience when her engagement to Matt was announced. The half-Latina detective might have harbored a hankering for the dishy Polish-American ex-priest. They were the same religion, after all, and Molina had never married and must be pushing forty. Temple was on the cusp of thirty-one, and Matt was thirty-four.

Su smiled, always a bad sign. “The lieutenant hasn’t been in to work the last couple of days.”

“Really,” Temple said, unwilling to admit she was interested.

“The flu, they say.”

Temple frowned.

“The Iron Maiden of the LVMPD never is out sick,” Su continued.

Temple wasn’t surprised. Molina had never let up in her vendetta against Max. They’d even duked it out mano-a-mana (if there was such a thing) in a Strip club parking lot. Molina had finally caught Max and he needed to get away fast because he knew Temple was in danger of becoming the next Stripper Killer victim.

Su’s piquant face had a sly, triumphant look.

Payback time for Temple, a rank amateur, copping a prime undercover assignment she had wanted. It didn’t matter that it had frosted Molina’s tortillas to ask such a favor of an antagonist. Temple had gotten the job, not Su, who was as capable of looking sixteen as Temple was, if that was an advantage when one was almost thirty-one and aching to be taken seriously in life and love.

Su leaned close to whisper, at just the right level of Temple’s left ear.

“The rumor is that the lady lieutenant flipped and eloped with that hunky magician you used to call yours. That’s why Max Kinsella is missing. She is too! They’re off together on a quickie marriage license and making whoopee in some cheap motel.”

NO!

Temple fought to look unruffled. No. Max would never—Molina would never—but look at Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Men like a challenge, and nobody liked a challenge more than Max. Strong women like stronger men. And Molina was a strong woman.

It made a kind of crazy sense.

Temple’s pulse was pounding in her . . . temples. She moved away from Su, who slunk into the waning crowd like a snake relieved of its poison. Temple was aghast. Disbelieving. Stunned. Betrayed. Jealous.

She looked for Matt, for a glimpse that would restore stability, remind her how much she loved and desired him.

He wasn’t there. Nobody still lingered at the head table. Everybody had drifted away without her noticing.

It wasn’t just Max anymore. It was everybody.

She gazed around.

The entire room was empty.

She was alone at the banquet table with its abandoned dessert plates and crumpled peach linen napkins.

This was a nightmare!

She needed somebody to tell her so, and nobody was there for her.

Not even the malicious Su anymore.

Max and Molina. Max and Carmen.

No!

Temple swallowed. She wanted to shout the word, but she couldn’t.

She couldn’t move. Couldn’t speak, shout.

No.

This was a nightmare.

Her nightmare.

She blinked her eyes open in the dark.

A warm hand was on her arm.

“Are you all right?” Matt’s voice came from the dark. “You were making almost strangling noises. Temple?”

Was she all right?

Obviously not, if she was still dreaming about Max.

Maybe this dream was the real good-bye. Her unconscious had paired Max with her worst enemy, the woman of her nightmares, and bid him adieu. Said good riddance to them both.

That was it. The dream was a sign any feelings for him were over. All gone. Gone with the Molina.

So revolting! Ugh.

She shuddered.

“You’re cold,” Matt said, tightening his grasp. “Let me warm you up.”

Carmen didn’t tell Morrie what she’d finally decided to do.

Father figures were great in theory, but her fathers had been confusing.

The Anglo mystery man who’d sired her had been driven out of the Hispanic family circle before she was born, her mother caving to ethnic, church, and family pressures. He was a literal ghost: pale, Nordic, blue-eyed. He lived on only in Carmen’s eye color, which had singled her out in every barrio and church and school photo of her early life. She would have hated him just for that if she’d had a chance to know him.

Her mother had married after her “mistake,” Carmen Regina, girl-child out of wedlock. Carmen had never bonded with her stepfather. As the eldest, she’d been half a mother to the many children they’d conceived in unfettered Catholic Hispanic certainty.

Every darling toddler seemed a rebuke. She’d loved them, and they her, but it was a sad charade of the half-life she lived. Carmen the half-breed.

She’d discovered some soul mates, old ladies she’d crossed paths with. They were the eldest children of men killed in World War II. Only children, only survivors. Their young, widowed mothers had remarried and started large fifties families. The lone older daughter who didn’t remember a father became the stepchildren’s quasi-mother from a very early age.

It didn’t make her crazy to go out and multiply on her own, whatever the church decreed.

Her liaison with Rafi Nadir was born of mutual alienation.

And then she’d ended up the mother of an only child in her turn.

Except she didn’t see hooking up again in her case, having more children.

Just this one. This precious one.

So her own only daughter was also a half-breed. Half Hispanic-Anglo, half Arab-American. Really, a quarter-breed.

People were supposed to say it didn’t matter. Ethnic origin. Skin shade. Eye color.

It did.

The knife wound had cut a swatch across Carmen’s olive skin.

Hatred was equal opportunity.

She felt the severing in her soul.

She’d been angry, anxious, insecure. Had let it pile up into a mountain of mistakes.

Why had Max Kinsella become such an obsession?

He’d gotten away without a scratch. Gotten away in a smart, slick, easy, painless way.

He hadn’t gotten stuck, as she had. He’d eeled out of a murder rap and even a miffed girlfriend he’d bailed out on for a year. Any other mortal would have paid, and paid big for being at the scene of the crime, skipping town, and coming back an uncatchable shadow. Not Max Kinsella. She hated people who got away with behaving badly. That had been her whole law enforcement life.

Maybe because she’d never dared to behave badly herself.

Until now. Breaking and entering. Arranging clandestine surveillance with an undercover cop who might be okay, might be rogue. Getting knifed, goddamn it, off the clock.

Now that her wound had forced her to lie still and think, alone at home, hurting physically, she realized that she’d made as many unwarranted assumptions as Max Kinsella ever had.

And she had been wrong! Kinsella was a target, as Matt and even Temple Barr had hinted. Not a perpetrator. He was an undercover operative? Kinsella! Holy Mother of All Things Annoying! She’d been chasing a shadow of herself.

Her attacker had knifed her while shredding Max Kinsella’s Las Vegas life to bits.

She’d thought she despised the man. She was a piker. Someone seriously whacked was out there.

Was Temple Barr safe? She had to think about that. Matt? Or . . . worse. Her attacker didn’t know who she was, just someone there. What if she’d been followed home? What if Mariah was now a target? She, Carmen, and her one-woman pursuit mission, had exposed her daughter to terrible danger perhaps.

Sitting up in bed made her belly burn as if she was in childbirth again.

Thank God for Morrie. He’d left her some ground to stand on: her job. She had to start using that better.

Number one: neutralize Rafi Nadir. He wasn’t going to go away, and if he really hadn’t tampered with her birth control device, why should he? Number two: distance herself from Dirty Larry. He’d come in handy for her, but you had to ask why. She didn’t need an ambiguous boyfriend. She needed . . . Morrie Alch. He was shrewd, loyal, and more than she deserved. Daddy dearest. She swallowed hard. Yes. She needed someone to look out for her. Yes, she still needed someone. Someone to watch over me.

The lyric and music played in her head. So what if she was a little feverish, a little Vicodined out.

She had a lot of catching up to do when she felt up to it in a few weeks.

Van von Rhine’s glass desktop in her Crystal Phoenix office was no longer bare and sleek.

It was littered with fat photograph albums displaying everything from the chosen floral arrangements to napkin designs.

Two huge boxes spilling gouts of gilt tissue were open on the navy Milan leather sofa.

Van, Temple, and Kit gathered reverentially around them.

“Kit, that ivory leather wedding suit of yours is gorgeous. Aldo will flip. I’m thinking bronze and the palest mauve orchids for the bridal bouquet. Simple, exotic, and expensive. What will you do for shoes?”

“I was thinking some sexy ankle boots. Bronze, you think?”

“Perfect. You need a firm foundation for the leather suit.” Van turned to Temple. “And you! Those shades of lilac and mauve are stunning.”

“I love purple shades,” Temple said, stroking the filmy gown. “And Matt seems to agree with me.” The dress was simple. It had spaghetti straps, so appropriate to an Italian wedding, an Empire waistline, and a flowing skirt that was short in front and longer in the back, all the better to showcase her Midnight Louie Austrian crystal shoes. This would be a White Carpet occasion.

Van actually produced a sentimental smile. “It’ll be perfect with your softer strawberry hair color, Temple. You’ll look adorable. Anyway, Kit, now that I’ve seen the gowns you two have chosen, and the bridesmaids’ rainbow of pale metallic colors, it’ll make the chapel and reception color themes a snap. We have everything on hand. I must say that outfitting eight bridesmaids for eight groomsmen has been a . . . diplomatic feat.”

“It seemed easiest,” Temple said, “to let the brothers invite their girlfriends.”

“I obviously don’t have any girlfriends in town,” Kit noted.

“So,” Temple said, “we have instant Eight Bridesmaids for Eight Brothers. What could be handier?”

“Is that a reference I should know?” Van asked.

Temple exchanged a knowing glance with her aunt. “Kit knows. It’s a famous fifties movie musical, based on a Stephen Vincent Benét story.”

When Van continued to look puzzled, Kit explained. “Benét was a poet. He updated the legend of Rome’s founders raiding the neighboring Sabine tribe for brides on whom to found their dynasty.”

“A musical based on mass rape?” Van said, shocked.

“Not really,” Temple said. “Benét transferred the plot to the America frontier, where women were rare. The seven brides are kidnapped, true, but to be wooed, not raped.”

“Some of the best musical choreography of the twentieth century is in that chestnut,” Kit added. “The late Michael Kidd. Great fun.”

Van raised her pale eyebrows, unconvinced. “Whatever their numbers, and in whatever age or locale, bridesmaids always have issues. That’s why I planned a pastel metallic rainbow of colors for them; every girl should find some shade she likes. The wedding is less than a week away. We need to fit them all in the next couple of days. I’ve been leaving voice mail messages all over town for them.” Van frowned. “I’m not getting calls back yet.”

While Temple and Kit reboxed their outfits, Van checked her watch. “The ‘boys’ should be arriving at the secret location of their bachelor party about now.”

“I hope,” Temple said, “Matt isn’t overwhelmed by all that big Italian family energy. He’s an only child from the conservative Midwest.”

“Aldo won’t let him get overwhelmed,” Kit said with a hug. “He takes his responsibility as the eldest seriously.”

“When’s your bachelorette party?” Van asked her.

“I don’t know a soul in town besides Temple and you and Electra. No party.”

“Nonsense,” Van said. “Call Electra over,” she told Temple. “We’re going up to the owner’s suite to drink ourselves silly on Cristal champagne. The boys didn’t get all the bottles into the Gangsters’ stretch limo without me copping a couple.”

Van stroked her smooth French twist and then winked. “We’re going to have a girls’ night in while they’re having a boys’ night out.”

The view out the spotless window glass was spectacular.

He leaned closer to see more of the snow-topped mountain peaks. They ringed a valley that plunged into the lush green slopes of early spring, wildflowers scattered everywhere like confetti. It was almost like looking out on a painting. Unreal.

He leaned even closer to the glass, as close as the wheelchair would permit. His head twisted left, then right, then up. Ah, huge eaves above. To take the snow in the winter. The building must be set into a hillside. The outside wall of his room was almost all glass. Supernaturally clean glass. That took money, that took pride, that took a certain fussy perfectionism that he understood, that pleased him.

The door to his room whooshed open. All the doors here were on air hinges so they wouldn’t shatter anyone’s nerves with an ill-timed bang. Or so they wouldn’t alert those inside who was coming and going.

A lot of people had been coming and going in his room, but he knew he’d been drugged and out of it probably for days or weeks, he could hardly remember any of it. Still, he was conscious now and was a quick study. Pain was throbbing in his legs and head, but no pain medication was fogging his brain. He’d palmed the pills once he’d become conscious for longer periods. He could let them think he was woozy, and he was, for purely natural reasons. He preferred pain to ignorance any day.

He turned the chair wheels toward the latest person who had whooshed into his territory. They never knocked around here. Medical personnel were like that.

He cocked his head at the visitor. Someone new. Someone not all in white scrubs. (He thought hospital personnel wore figured scrubs now, whimsically colorful, to put patients at ease, but in this place both doctors and nurses wore wedding-gown white.)

Having the light from the huge window at his back was an advantage. He could assess his latest visitor.

Tallish. Female. Wearing a pale green silk runway suit worth a couple thousand with a Hermes scarf as carelessly arranged as her tawny blond hair. A professional, surely. But what kind? Chorus girl legs and knows it. Skirt hem just at the knee. Clipboard? Short, polished nails. Not a nurse, for sure. Doctor? Too upscale. Too silent. No “Good morning, how are you today?”

He could play that game. He observed her taking him in. He had no idea what he looked like. Felt like hell, but he wasn’t going to cop to a weakness.

“May I sit?” she asked.

He nodded. What the hell—? The accent was slight, but European. He’d overheard a babel of languages since he’d been brought here, barely conscious. English. French. German. Some others. . . .

“My name is Schneider,” she said, leaning forward to reveal a tantalizing glimpse of cleavage where the suit lapels met, holding out one hand.

Nobody medical shook hands in a hospital. Her hand was warm where his was cold, and her grip was solid. He returned it, even though that sent a spasm down his shoulder to his spine to his damned useless legs.

“Doctor?” he asked.

“In a sense.” Like a doctor, she studied his chart on the clipboard, putting him in uneasy suspension. “Your case is most interesting.”

“Tell me about it. Nobody’s thought to mention how interesting I was to me.”

She chuckled. “Americans. So direct.”

“Since I’m direct you might as well tell me who and what you are and what right you have to read up on my blood pressure and bowel movements.”

“Challenging, not direct,” she corrected herself. “All right, Mr. Randolph, I’ll tell you what you ask and then you can answer some questions for me.”

Randolph. That wasn’t his name. He knew that. When you’re at a disadvantage and don’t know what’s going on, act as if you do. Let them tell you, when they think all along that they’re conducting an interrogation.

“No one quite knows what happened to you, Mr. Randolph. Do you?”

He shrugged. Ouch. Apparently he couldn’t move much of anything.

“Obviously,” she went on, “a climbing accident, but what kind? Were you alone on the mountain? Was it equipment failure? An avalanche? Carelessness?”

He felt the wince cross his features before he could stop it.

She caught it and threw it back at him. “You resent the implication that you could have been careless. You’re not the sort of man to make mistakes.”

“And you know this how?”

“It’s my job to know what you think.”

It’s my job to keep you from knowing that, he thought. I’d do it better if I weren’t in so much pain. As you well know, you leggy blond bully.

“My name is Schneider,” she repeated. “Revienne Schneider. I’m here to find out about your accident. Temporary memory loss about the details is to be expected.”

Her voice was soft, yet rich. He’d heard women announcers on German radio who purred over the airwaves that way, amazingly seductive for a language that seemed harsh. Yet she dressed like a Frenchwoman. And her first name stemmed from the French verb for “returning, haunting.” Odd name. Odd that he should remember such oddments of French.

“You don’t speak much, but you think a lot,” she said.

“A man with temporary memory loss wouldn’t have much to say.”

“Hmm.” She licked her lips judiciously as she studied the unseen chart again. “It’s quite remarkable that you survived a fall of so far. The surgeons said the violence of the impact was severe.”

Surgeons. How many? For what? What was wrong with him, other than temporary memory loss and the fact that his legs were in heavy incapacitating casts? And the pain all over, of course. No one had told him anything. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been unconscious, or conscious. Shards of motion, conversation swirled around his brain, yet his first clear memory had been of looking out the window. Just now.

“I fell here?”

“In the Alps? No. You were flown in.”

“From—”

“Nepal.”

“I am quite the climber, aren’t I?”

Nepal! That didn’t sound right. Falling, yes. Something in his gut twisted and fell again. Falling.

She smiled so slightly he might have been imagining it. “Climbers are a breed apart. I can’t say I understand the sport myself. The ego must be as high as the mountain to be conquered.”

He said nothing. She was both criticizing and admiring him, appealing to his ego, appealing to his . . . libido, whatever he had left of it after the fall and the pain and the medication.

“You’re a . . . psychiatrist,” he said. “You think you can manipulate my memory of the fall to come back.”

Her slight shrug didn’t pain her shoulders, but it did wonders for her bodice. He did have some libido left, after all. Since he was forgoing the pain pills, he might as well sample some alternative medication. . . .

“You’re a man used to being in control, Mr. Randolph. If you weren’t wealthy, you wouldn’t be at this sanitarium. If you weren’t willing to risk, you wouldn’t be in a wheelchair.” She leaned closer again, flashed her subtle cleavage, hardly worth it. “Were you drunk?”

“No!” The response was instant, emphatic. He surprised himself.

“As I say. You are a man using to being in control. Or believing that he is. Or it could be denial. Do you know?”

He was silent, thinking. So much was foggy, even without drugs. Drunk. The accusation repelled him. Why was this his strongest reaction yet? Why was he so sure?

“If you have to ask, you don’t know,” he said.

Chagrin flickered over her annoyingly serene features.

“They’d have taken blood tests right after the accident, yes?” he asked.

She nodded. “No alcohol or recreational drugs in your system. At that point. But you were flown in from another continent.”

He nodded, in turn, to the window and the panorama of what he now knew were the Alps. But which Alps? French, Italian, Swiss? The Alps snaked across Europe like the rim of a massive crater.

He said, “Any climber, especially a control freak, would be crazy to drink anything but water up there.”

“ ‘Control freak.’ I do love American expressions. They always cut to the . . . pursuit.”

“Chase. Cut to the chase. The expression is based on early filmmaking. Directors of cheap thriller movies would skip the exposition, the dialogue, and cut to the action scene: bad guys chasing good guys.”

“And which guy are you?”

He smiled at how formal the word guy sounded in her overprecise English. “We don’t know yet, do we? So why’d you ask if I was drunk, when you knew the tests proved me sober?”

“I wanted your spontaneous answer.”

“Just to be mean? Taunt the invalid?” He almost added, “Get a rise out of him?” but decided that was too close to reality.

Actually, he was enjoying this in more ways than one. He’d heard only solicitous murmurs in the far back of his mind for a long time, maybe even weeks. It was good to exercise his brain on something, someone not treating him like a helpless child.

She pursed her lips while examining the chart he suspected was a meaningless prop for her inquisition. Psychiatrists always thought they could outthink their patients, and she was exactly what he’d suspected she was. But what kind of psychiatrist?

“Actually, Mr. Randolph,” she said at last, “being drunk is the only rational explanation for why you weren’t more seriously injured. The surgeons said your fall had the impact of a car crash at sixty miles an hour. You should be dead, or in a cast up to your cerebellum. Instead, you have a couple of broken legs. Not fun, but not as lethal as it should be.”

“You’d prefer me dead?”

“Of course not. But the surgeons said that the only way you could have come off so lightly, the only way anyone did from an impact like that, was as a drunk driver. The kind that walks away from a crash that kills his victims because he was so inebriated his body was utterly limp during the crash. Senselessness saves the sinner.”

He didn’t like hearing how bad it could have been. Or being compared to a drunk driver. He knew he hadn’t brought this on himself. Why was she trying to make him feel guilty? Some shrink! She was doing everything she could to rile him. Weren’t there laws against this kind of patient abuse?

He gazed out the window. From this distance the majestic peaks seemed only postcard pretty, not lethal. And he couldn’t picture himself attacking those sharp icy teeth with pitons and a pickax. Not his thing. But it must be.

He glanced back. Her eyes had never left his face.

“Maybe,” he said, “I’m just a relaxed kind of guy.”

“That doesn’t go with the control freak.”

“Maybe I’m more complex than you think.”

“Oh, I think you’re very complex, Mr. Randolph. Too much so. I don’t want to keep you. À bientôt.”

Until later.

He watched her leave, relishing a future tete-à-tete. His legs were broken, maybe not badly, thank God, but she was right about his need for control. He hated this wheelchair.

He propelled it into the adjoining bathroom, through a bland blond door wide enough to accommodate it. Brushed steel assistance bars were everywhere, but he was interested in the shower rod above the—nice, if his casts were off!—Jacuzzi bathtub.

Pushing himself upright against the white-tiled wall, he studied the rod and its attachments to the tile. Solid. Everything here was for security and safety. German-built. Like Revienne Schneider.

He grasped the pole underhanded and then hauled up against his imprisoned legs. If he was such a gung ho mountain climber, he didn’t want to lose any upper body strength. He guessed he’d been doing this during every conscious, unchaperoned moment. The first pull-up was still agony. The second worse. He did ten. Twelve, twenty, then stopped and lowered himself on trembling arms into the wheelchair.

He’d forgotten to check himself out in the mirror over the sink while he’d been upright, but it was probably just as well. He had a feeling he wouldn’t recognize his face. He knew “things,” could think, but he didn’t know a damn thing about himself or how he’d got here. What really bothered him was the name “Randolph.” It had a vague familiarity, but it wasn’t his. It didn’t feel like his name.

Nothing did. Surnames tumbled through his brain—O’Donnell . . . Kinkaid . . . Bar . . . Bartle. Moline. But that was a town in Illinois. His brain had salvaged lots of general information, but no specifics. No faces and places. He’d have to analyze himself before that tight-lipped shrink pried out more than he wanted her to.

He knew a lot about mountains and foreign languages and attractive interrogators, but he didn’t know a damn thing about himself except what he could weasel out of his shrink.

Nothing.

Not even his name.

Matt, maybe. The name just came to him! Matt?

Matt Randolph. Didn’t feel right.

Matt was trying to be a good go-along guy.

Mob scenes, figurative or literal, weren’t his thing.

Stag entertainment wasn’t on his horizon or in his history.

An ex-priest had a hard time regarding women as sex objects.

Large amounts of bare female skin still made him uneasy.

Intimately, it was a turn-on. Publicly, it was . . . gross, crude, blatant. Exploitive of both gawker and gawkee.

And, of course, all en route to this bachelor blowout, he wondered, not what Jesus would do—He’d probably be okay with it; witness the woman at the well and the wedding at Cana; Jesus had been the Prince of Peace and the Soul of Mercy and Tolerance—but what Temple would think.

Of him.

This did not promise to be an easygoing evening.

So when he saw the peep show backlit at the entrance to wherever they had been driven, he thought, Holy mackerel!

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid could not have been greeted by a perkier array of corseted, feather boa-strewn, high heel-booted saloon girls in their heyday.

He’d expected to suffer through this supposed festivity. He hadn’t expected to be as badly ribbed as the guest of honor, bridegroom-to-be Aldo Fontana.

“Pretty good goods,” a Fontana brother commented, jabbing his ribs.

“You get what you pay for,” Matt answered, meaning every shade of the words.

They bounced off Fontana brother bonhomie.

“Right. This is way spicier than I expected, now that Aldo is giving up his wild, womanizing ways. We’re gonna actually have fun. I can tell. Let the partee begin!”

Matt and, of all not-people, Midnight Louie were the last to move into the dazzling light. The cat had been first, but now hesitated on the threshold.

Temple’s black cat, a last-minute hitchhiker, finally trod in delicately, forefoot by forefoot. Matt could have sworn the cat was as much taken aback by this Wild West saloon scenario as he was.

“We’ll both have to keep a sober eye on the proceedings,” Matt told Louie under his breath.

It disturbed him immensely that the big black cat winked at him.

Okay. One eye closed momentarily. Maybe he had a hair caught in it.

Twelve men and cat had entered a Wild Wild West fantasy of a Victorian brothel. The flocked floral wallpaper wasn’t scarlet woman crimson-colored, but it was velvet-flocked: deep blue against a silver foil background.

The carpeting was a field of Victorian, full-blown roses (so appropriate to the feminine residents). The shades were blue and green with touches of gold.

Beyond the foyer in the parlor, on various blue velvet love seats and settees in the Victorian style, lounged, lay, and reclined about a dozen women attired in bits and pieces of corsets and lingerie, all in shades of blue.

If there were eight groomsmen in the party, there was a shade of blue for each one: baby blue, aqua, sky blue, periwinkle . . . lavender-blue, Dilly, Dilly . . . teal, ice blue, royal blue, sapphire blue, and even navy blue, in the form of a sailor suit with a bikini bottom and a skimpy sea-shrunken top.

While the groomsmen leapt to the task of inspection, Matt was interested to see that Aldo and Nicky were loitering in the foyer with frowns on their faces.

One was almost wed, one married, so Matt approved of them showing at least some discretion. Uncle Macho Mario Fontana was accepting a cigar the size of a submarine sandwich from the madam of the place, the only woman fully clothed. She wore some Mae West blue-sequined gown rimmed in pale blue feathers at the shoulders.

Matt edged over to the frowners because they most closely reflected his own confusion.

“We were supposed to go to the G-String Club on the Strip,” Nicky was saying under his breath, “with the nude harpists. I mean, fun’s fun, but this place is obviously—” He shut up as he noticed Matt approaching.

Aldo’s back was to Matt and he kept talking. “Kit will have my nose hairs in a vise and our Miss Temple will have all our heads on pikes outside the Crystal Phoenix if she finds out about this. The guys said they’d arranged a first-class venue with one discreet, cake-popper-out-of stripper. The usual harmless prank.”

“This,” Matt said, “doesn’t look ‘usual’ to me, and I’ve never been to one of these before.”

Nicky’s upper lip was actually dewed with tiny dots of sweat. He had his cell phone to his ear.

“Sorry, Father,” he murmured absently. “Damn!” he spat at Aldo. “I’m not getting a signal. We are screwed. What’s going on here? That drive was way too long.”

Aldo was chewing his lower lip. “I thought we were deliberately being driven around town so we’d have time to do our duty by the champagne.”

The eldest and youngest Fontana brothers were clearly dealing with an unexpected situation.

“Why don’t we ask the driver?” Matt suggested.

Nicky and Aldo exchanged a long stare.

“Good idea!” Aldo strode toward the door, Nicky and Matt behind him.

Aldo opened it on someone on the other side. Someone in a nifty black chauffeur’s cap and jacket, and nothing else but fishnet stockings, four-inch black heels, and an Uzi cradled in her uniformed elbow.

“Holy shi—shazam!” Nicky breathed, glancing at Matt midway through his expletive.

“No need to get huffed,” the caramel-skinned chauffeurette said, caressing the Uzi’s trigger with her forefinger. Her nails were long and lacquered crimson. “You all look so cute standing out here with your mouths hanging open, but you’d better get back inside before this big mean gun gets too heavy for little me to hold and I grab onto the wrong part.”

Nicky and Aldo backed up quickly. Maybe it was her remark about the wrong part. Matt stayed put.

“You drove us out here?” he asked. “Why?”

She looked him over, mostly his face and blond hair. “You may be an innocent bystander, mister, but an Uzi isn’t very discriminating.”

“Jesus!” Aldo breathed behind him. “I for one don’t underestimate the ‘weaker’ sex. This is as serious as that chest-stapler she’s holding. What the hell—?”

“Get back inside,” Nicky ordered. When Matt didn’t move, he shouted at the girl, “You’d off a priest?”

“Ex,” Matt tossed over his shoulder without taking his eyes from the woman. He was used to talking to suicidal and sometimes homicidal people on his call-in radio advice show. This girl didn’t strike him as either.

But her next words and tone changed his mind. “A priest,” she purred. “Now isn’t that interesting. Maybe we can use you for some ceremonial necessities later.”

“They don’t do extreme unction anymore,” Aldo said, jerking Matt back inside the foyer by the jacket sleeve. “Hold your trigger finger, lady. We’re all inside.”

Matt shook himself loose as soon as the door slammed shut. “She’s not for real.”

“That Uzi sure is,” Nicky said. “Never argue with a fully automatic gun that can kill your whole damn family in one strafe.” He redialed his cell phone. “Nothing. You take this,” he said to Matt, slipping it into his jacket pocket. “It’s an auto-dial to Van. I have a feeling this is a Fontana affair.” His face and voice were grim.

“Some gangsta hoods have heisted us,” Aldo said. “Don’t let the James Bond girl in fishnet hose fool you, padre. This is a sharp operation. They’ve got Fontana Inc. in the palms of their machine pistols. The whole enchilada. Shit!”

“Yup. The whole Mama Fontana pasta factory.” Nicky turned to Matt. “Play along. Don’t make any fuss. We’re the target, obviously. They may overlook you.”

“They?”

But the two brothers were separating at the double doors to the parlor, drawing Berettas and waiting like cops about to storm a crime in progress.

“Mr. Fontana and . . . Mr. Fontana?” came the madam’s once-booming voice, sounding quivery. “Please come in.”

“And drop your weapons before you do,” a second voice commanded.

Consulting each other with a glance, Nicky and Aldo lowered their guns to the floor and kicked them inside onto the field of blue flowers that carpeted the place.

Matt stood, shocked, in the foyer as the two men vanished into the Victorian sitting room at some unseen gunpoint.

This must be act one in a Vegas mob war.

From Temple’s talk of the Fontana brothers, he’d considered them hunky comic relief on the Las Vegas scene. Apparently it was a lot more serious than that. Thank God Temple was safe at home at the Circle Ritz. Sweet Jesus. Louie! Her precious alley cat was here, in danger of getting caught in the crossfire. Anything happened to him, it’d be worse than the current anxiety she was feeling about Max. She tried to downplay it, but he knew.

Nicky was right. Nobody had mentioned him. He glanced to his left and the floral-carpeted staircase leading into shadows above. Thank God! Midnight Louie stood five steps up, waiting for him. Looking like the cat was concerned about him, rather than vice versa. That was a cat for you.

But Louie was right. Matt got it. In this crowd of large, dark-haired men barging into that crowded and armed and dangerous brothel sitting room, an effacing blond guy might get lost. He had been. Along with an alley cat. The driver-gangster girl wouldn’t forget him, but she was pulling guard duty outside, perhaps for the duration.

He moved swiftly to the stairs and cautiously up the treads. The place may have looked like it dated from the last days of the frontier, but the steps were solid and creakless. All the better for serial hanky-panky in the night. Not that sex was on anybody’s mind anymore. Just its perennial partner. Death.

Only when he reached the dark at the top of the stairs did Matt notice that Midnight Louie was no longer anywhere to be seen.

Of course, nobody notices a couple of cats roaming the premises.

Some of my breed might be a bit miffed that humankind is so ready to overlook the species the ancient Egyptians worshipped. Unfortunately, any remaining Egyptians have lost the faith. Besides, being overlooked has always been my ace in the hole. Especially if you are black and low-profile. Now we are two.

So Satin and I ankle into the main parlor. I must say I shudder at what I see.

One by one, the Fontana boys have been gestured at major gunpoint into this room. All I see of the gangsters are black boots, leggings, turtleneck-sweater sleeves, and leather gloves. And black 9mm guns to match. I must admit I admire the unknown perps’ color choice, although it has long been the uniform of cat burglars, including myself.

Satin and I follow the latest Fontana brother to suffer this indignity, unnoticed.

One of them, maybe Ernesto, is being patted down, front and back—intimately—by agile gloved hands, and relieved of his signature Beretta.

I shiver as I observe this. This is not something a guy ought to undergo in front of witnesses, particularly several older brothers.

I growl my protest to Satin.

“Yes, Louie,” she comforts me. “It is most ignominious. My ladies here exist to coddle the male ego. They devote their lives to it. Such violation is . . . unthinkable. Males egos are such delicate flowers.”

“Uh. I am a catclaw cactus kinda guy myself. Violate me and I dig deep. These guys are merely playing along for the moment until they figure out the who and why of this high-handed, high-artillery assault. The Fontana family goes back to the days of Thompson submachine guns. True, these bozos got the drop on them, but that will not be all she wrote. Trust me. This is not over.”

“So who are the gangsters who hold your male compadres captive?”

A good question.

Inside the room, I see the perps are wearing spandex masks that would make them as unrecognizable as Spider-Man’s evil twin. However, they have accessorized even that full coverage with large sixties-style black sunglasses, which gives them a creepy bug-eyed look.

Additionally, they range from tallish to six-foot size and say not a word, letting the long lean metal barrels of their guns do the gesturing for them.

All in all, this is a very disturbing and sinister mime act.

Beyond the fussy parlor, I glimpse an empty bar area with the usual clubby look, carpet and leather chairs, mirror and bottle glass. I suggest we remain in this “debriefing” room in our guise of helpless domestic pets.

My description is not half wrong. The masked thugs stripping the Fontana brothers of their weapons are also making unwarranted searches of their underwear.

“Oof!” Emilio objects, avoiding an illegal forward pass with a swiveling hip movement that would do any running back proud. “There is nothing resembling lead there.”

I bite my tongue. The nature of this disarming is suddenly all too evident to my super feline senses. The “gangsters” are all of the female persuasion.

I spot the long nailed hands under the leather gloves and watch them add another Beretta to the impressive pile, and shudder. Wait until the boys discover they have been disarmed by women. That is not a macho position to be in.

“The gangsters have very agile and clever claws,” Miss Satin allows.

That is the thing. This gang of masked women have high-end manicures and their claws are all utterly false, the glue-on kind adapted in envy of my kind.

Why do these dames need these guys disarmed and dangerous?

I am detecting a certain barely veiled lust.

I must admit that I am used to that reaction among the female faction, as are the Fontana boys. It is just that we are not used to being disabled because of it. I do not know how to convey these ugly realities to poor little Satin.

While I dither, so uncharacteristically, she is coming to her own conclusions from her years in the brothel.

“These women do not want hostages,” she merows in my ear.

“They want mates.”

This wafts a vibrissa too close to our own once-upon-a-time relationship.

I huff up my collar into an impressive ruff and growl.

No one notices.

“All right,” one of the masked and clawed dames (you would think she was the homicidal Hyacinth, a Siamese of my acquaintance) snarls. Yes, she snarled, just as you and I would, if we were both feline.

“You boys can settle down here now that your claws are clipped. Sit down. Look and do not touch. Say nothing. We will let you know what comes next.”

Puzzled and disarmed, the Fontana boys sit gingerly on the froufrou pieces of furniture. I understand their conflict. A macho guy doesn’t do blue satin, but neither does a gentleman poleax a lady, not even an armed and dangerous gang of them.

“Now see here,” Macho Mario says, not moving a muscle.

“You do not know who you are tangling with.”

“It is you who are ignorant of the fury of your opponents,” one dame says in a credible baritone growl.

“Sit. Don’t move. We have business elsewhere in the establishment, but are leaving guards at each archway.”

A gentleman does not poleax a lady, but Macho Mario’s expression as he drops his weight into a pale blue velvet upholstered Victorian chair indicates he may now be willing to make an exception.

After the gang presence withdraws, I notice that Mr. Nicky Fontana, the youngest and only married brother, and the only CEO among them, is missing.

So I inform Miss Satin, sotto voce. (This is an operatic term meaning under my tuna breath.)

After she reels away, she comes up with a rejoinder. “Why would they single out your Mr. Nicky?”

“I do not think they did. They are interested in the bachelor party. He is not a bachelor and thus escaped their notice, like my Mr. Matt.”

“Tell me again about ‘your Mr. Matt.’ “

“He is the only cream in the all-black flock, also not a Fontana. He was just along for the ride.”

“So were you,” she points out.

“So, they got a couple of ringers in the bunch. Let us remain in the parlor and see what the Fontana boys and the ladies of the house have to say to one another.”

While we creep farther into this Suite in Blue, we see the house ladies sitting up straighter than the Teetotaler Ladies Tea Society on one side and the Fontana boys staring at their polished shoe tips and their buffed nails on the other, with a couple of the black-clad posse in between.

Aldo is checking the ticking old-fashioned mantel clock every thirty seconds. He is calculating that this was supposed to be a boys’ night out, an all-nighter. No one will miss them until at least one P.M. tomorrow, Tuesday, give or take a hangover or twelve.

I see that the gang has removed all of their Rolexes as well as the Italian hardware. So is profit the motive, or something more personal?

“You know who these women are?” Aldo asks the madam.

“We do not usually entertain women.”

“You recognize any of them?”

There is a rustle of taffeta and tulle. My nails itch for a good rip, but I hold back.

A girl done up like the Blue Angel speaks hesitantly. “I recognized one voice.”

“Yes?” the madam encourages the damsel in question.

“I think she called a couple days ago, inquiring about our . . . hours.”

The madam barks out a laugh. “Pretty much twenty-four seven, like the rest of Las Vegas. What did she think?”

“She asked if we . . . handled . . . groups.”

“And—?” The madam was frowning now.

“I said we can do groups up to twenty, and she booked us for tonight for a twenty-four-hour exclusive.”

“Shii . . . take mushrooms,” Aldo explodes, suddenly mindful of the female company. A Fontana boy is always the soul of courtesy. “That means no one else is going to show up here until tomorrow night. Why’d the gang need that much time?”

“Scary,” Emilio says mournfully. “I do not even slot in my best girlfriend for a full twenty-four exclusive.”

“Have you had such a booking before?” Rico asks the madam.

She shakes her lavender-blue tinted head.

“I thought it was a corporate inquiry,” the angel-baby in blue woman says in defense. “The woman who called sounded like an executive assistant. I thought it was one of the big hotels going all out for a celebrity high roller and his posse.”

“She was an executive thief,” Emilio grumbles. “They have got a hundred thou in our Rolexes alone. Rolexi?”

“You never were any good in Latin class in high school,” Rico says.

“Who needs more Latin than ’veni, vidi, vici’?”

The madam, who must have had high school Latin too and learned Caesar’s boast: “I came, I saw, I conquered,” laughs again.

“Not tonight, boys. Besides, surely the Fontana brothers can disarm an army of men in tights.”

That is just it. The madam has not had a close look at our captors. These are not men in tights, but girls in guns, an even uglier thought. Those delicate ladyfingers are not used to packing trigger-sensitive iron. They could break a nail and spray the room with bullets without even meaning to.

“It sounds,” says the madam, “like we all will be here for a while. We should introduce ourselves. I am Miss Kitty.”

Satin and I exchange a glance. It is sad how often our kind’s various nicknames are borrowed for ladies of the night and shady activities. The ancient Egyptians stuck to a simple “Meow” when naming us.

The ladies give their first names in turn. There is an Angela, Babette, Crystal, Deedee, Fifi, Gigi, Heather, Inez, Jazz, Kiki, Lili, Niki, and Zazu.

Satin hisses into my ear. “Only thirteen are working tonight, a bad sign. The reservation was for that number.”

Meanwhile, I am doing some math of my own. There are the ten Fontana brothers, Mr. Matt, and Uncle Mario, the big kahuna, who has been detained, bound, in the archway to the barroom. That is twelve. “Who is the thirteenth of these ladies for?” I wonder.

“The limo driver,” Satin hisses back.

But the limo driver was replaced, so why order the full house? And where is the limo driver, anyway? Obviously, someone else took over for him and drove the whole crew here to this unexpected destination.

Was he bribed, led astray, or waylaid? I can only hope they knocked him out back at Gangsters’ and he is now raising the alarm in Vegas.

Except who is he going to call when the whole clan Fontana is under lock and key and gun sites here at the Sapphire Slipper? And he would not know where to send anyone, anyway.

Who you gonna call? Crimebusters!

I turn to Satin. “I am going to, uh, deputize you for the duration. Midnight Inc. Investigations needs a little beefing up at the moment.” I notice the airy vibrissae over her eyes waft. “Nothing personal. Just an expression we use in the private cop trade.”

“I will be your undercovers partner, Louie,” she says, rubbing the side seams on my slinky black satin coat the right way.

I swallow. “Undercover partner, Satin. That is the expression we use in the private cop trade.”

I must admit, though, that the atmosphere here puts a wild hair up my nose. And it is black satin.

By now the parlor scene has settled down.

The Fontana brothers and Uncle Mario have been stripped of all the heavy metal on their persons, which I see includes a few switchblades. These weapons and primo examples of the watchmaker’s art are piled on the big round table with a fringed cloth. They are guarded by a single sylph in black spandex bearing a single Uzi.

A whole lot of tall, rangy Fontana brothers are hunched unhappily on the various blue velvet Victorian settees intended to be draped by skimpily-clad ladies of the night. And day, here in Las Vegas.

Macho Mario Fontana is established in a low-slung Victorian chair, attended by the madam herself.

The resident “girls” are arrayed along the walls, eyeing the Uzis at the archways to the bar and the foyer with edgy respect.

Only us felines are cool. Like the kidnappers. Wait! How can you “kidnap” a roster of fully adult brothers? An interesting question.

I send Satin to the kitchen to eavesdrop on the other distaff kidnappers and remain to see how the men of the party are reacting.

“This is ridiculous,” Macho Mario blusters. “We have a lot of outside firepower to call on.”

“If you could call,” a guard in masked spandex purrs, pointing to the pile of RAZR cell phones on the table. “Take a gun, a watch, and a cell phone from a tough Las Vegas wiseguy, and he is limp linguini.”

Yup. This dame purrs. Like the lead femme fatale on a soap opera.

A lot of Fontana fingers twitch at that taunt. They not only are not trigger fingers, or itchy cell phone fingers, but well-buffed champagne bottle fingers. I must admit it makes the hair on my hackles rise to see so many dudes cowed by a bunch of distaff desperados. Desperadas.

Then out from the kitchens via the empty barroom strides the full posse again: I count seven altogether. They are all either anorexic muscle boys, or women.

I notice the Fontanas notice the same thing, and breathe out mutual sighs of relief.

Premature.

“We can cuff you if you need it,” a woman’s voice says. “There are plenty of cuffs around here.”

“Even gentle baby blue-dyed, rabbit fur-lined cuffs,” another lady desperado lisps, flaunting a few pair. “We like live rabbits.”

A few Uzis focus rather unnervingly on both the Fontana boys and the brothel girls.

“Faux fur!” the madam shouts, like a team coach crying “Foul.” “No rabbits were injured in constructing our erotic handcuffs! I have a paper that guarantees that.”

“What about the girls in those handcuffs?” one black-clad figure asks, twirling the silly artifact in question.

I will never understand the human notion of naughtiness. If they had ever had to wear a collar for real, or get their ears clipped or rear branded for identification purposes, they would see that S&M is really just Sad and Mean. But maybe these toys are for B&D. My canine cousins know about Bondage and Discipline all too well. Luckily, we felines are usually the S part of S&M.

However, the whip hand, so to speak, is held by the little ladies with the captured Berettas and switchblades and even metal nail files, oh my.

Well, Satin is hissing along with the commando girls now, and we dudes—the Fontanas and myself—are seriously outnumbered.

Aldo takes the lead and answers. “We were bound for a harmless little bachelor party at a harmless little bar. Not here. Not for a brothel, however well staffed and really well decorated and, er, manned by such lovely ladies. If you want to condemn anybody, condemn yourselves. You picked this place.”

There is a long sentence.

Then one clear soprano answers, “But you didn’t pick us!”

The nasty black spandex masks peel off.

I gaze upon beauty bare, an octet of lovely ladies in the prime of their twenties and thirties. Their expressions are intense.

“Why are we always the bridesmaids and never the brides?” another demands.

“Aldo may be tying the knot—the only real man among you!—but you younger brothers are still playing the field. And we, the field, don’t like it,” says another.

Silence prevails.

The Fontana brothers eye the women they chose to play bridesmaids to their groomsmen in the imminent wedding.

“Hey!” shouts Macho Mario. “I’m not even in the wedding party. I am an innocent victim. Take my nephews. They are philandering dogs! But I am innocent. I should be sprung.”

“He is ‘sprung’ all right,” one woman says, sashaying over to cluck Macho Mario under the chin with the business end of a confiscated Beretta.

While he sputters his indignation, she eyes the ladies of the house arrayed along the walls.

“Okay. Here’s the deal. This is between us and these handsome but sadly maritally backward guys. We can confine you in the house B&D room, or you can put these sweet baby blue and pink faux rabbit-fur cuffs on our hairy-wristed guests. It is up to you, ladies. Nine ought to do it, if we include Mr. Macho shaking on the lounge chair over there.”

Fontana brothers pale in unison as the blue and pink fuzzy handcuffs are flourished.

I sympathize, observing with a low growl to Satin, “These rogue bridesmaids are mean. Real guys do not wear pink. Especially in fetish wear!”

“Really? I think the baby blue at least goes rather well with black hair.” She bats her eyelashes at me.

Yes, we felines do have eyelashes outside of cartoon representations of our kind. Take a close look at yours sometime, if you can do so without a faceful of shivs.

Me? Bound in baby blue? Pretty in pink? I do not think so!

One thing I find consoling: Mr. Nicky Fontana is also missing. In a blitz of brothers I can understand how the berserk bridesmaids overlooked a married one they seldom saw. Those full-coverage masks and bug-eyed sunglasses do not permit much peripheral vision. And these little dolls are totally focused on the objects of their frustrated affections, not any spare and ineligible dude.

“This is just a girls’ idea of a bachelor party they can control,” Miss Satin sniffs. “They have no criminal intent and are paying for the staff’s time.”

“Fur-covered or not, those handcuffs are effective,” I say. “I do not like to see dudes of my gender, if not my species, lose their dignity, not to mention their hardware. What do these dames hope to gain by this?”

“Have a little fun at the guys’ expense and remind them that the girls have been taken for granted. That is why many of our gentleman callers visit the Sapphire Slipper. They feel taken for granted.”

Satin slips me another long-lashed look. I have a sick feeling that she is also referring to my amorous attentions back in the day when we were an item on and off the Strip.

It is likely true that no real mayhem is intended here, except that Mrs. Nicky Fontana will be anxious if her wandering spouse is not home by the wee hours of the morning, and it sounds like this captivity is shaping up to be a twenty-four-hour deal.

I would not want to be hanging around the penthouse suite at the Crystal Phoenix when Miss Van von Rhine discovers that Mr. Nicky is not only not coming home tonight, but the Gangsters’ limo is lost in space.

Sorry, Miss Temple, I do not need a pat on the head, I need wheels and some armed and dangerous backup.

The women are still a bit shocked and shaky despite their brave talk, but it is no surprise at all to me that a midnight phone call reveals that the old man is ruff deep in a hotbed of shady women, dangerous men, and murder most sleazy.

I am surprised, though, that Mr. Matt Devine, who provided my first temporary shelter after I showed up as a stray at the Crystal Phoenix, would be in any danger of a murder rap.

No way, Bombay! That is not going to happen with Midnight Louise around.

I let the women-behind-the-men on the hot seat out in the desert run around and mount what passes for a rescue party.

I take careful note of their urgent shouts and consultations.

My sharp ears (both in their external appearance and aural effectiveness) twitch this way and that to take it all in. This Sapphire Slipper is tucked away on the backside of any reasonable distance, but where there is a will, there is a way.

“Won’t we need, uh, weapons?” Miss Kit Carlson asks, sounding as fierce as her frontier gunslinger namesake.

“No. Nicky said not.” Miss Van von Rhine is her sharp, efficient self again, her hair slicked down and smoothed for a rumble. “The brothers were traveling fully loaded, and the mock-kidnapping has turned into a hysterical hen party, he says. The boys will soon be in charge again.”

“When were they ever not?” Miss Temple Barr asks.

Miss Van von Rhine lifts an almost-invisible eyebrow. These pale human show cats have barely any vibrissae over their eyes, unlike my lush black spidery lashes.

“Apparently for a few hours tonight they have been disarmed, bound, and held utterly helpless.”

Miss Temple gives a disbelieving cry.

I agree. No wonder murder was afoot if the Fontana brothers were tied hand and foot. Who would be so stupid as to take the only decent muscle in Las Vegas out of action?

“I do not care what you say,” Miss Electra says. “We can stop at the Circle Ritz on the way for a couple useful switchblades I got from my motorcycle club guys. Forearmed is forewarned.”

Now we are rockin’! My switchblades are built-in, and I do not go anywhere without them. They are my American Excess card.

I follow the rescue party down in the elevator and into the blare and glare of the hotel’s busy gaming and public spaces . . . unnoticed.

Naturally no one would think to take me along, but I cannot allow the senior partner of Midnight Inc. Investigations to stew in his own aging juices. Besides, I can hardly wait to see the old buzzard held captive in a brothel. He will never live that down. Not while I am around.

Max.

Short, simple. Not sweet.

So was the name Mike. And it had a faint, familiar ring too. Could a man have two names? Maybe first and middle. Max. Michael . . . whatever.

He wondered how much he could trust Garry Randolph, pleasant as the man was.

He knew he couldn’t trust Revienne Schneider. She came into his room the next day wearing a cleverly cut pink wool suit with a long, belted jacket over the short skirt, still as leggy as a runway model.

He’d done thirty chin-ups on the shower rod that morning. His joints were aching, but the glow the pink suit gave her complexion was a nice liniment. What wounded man didn’t enjoy a delicious nurse? One whose faltering memory was hers for the plundering, if he didn’t watch it.

“You look remarkably well this morning, Mr. Randolph,” she commented.

“And you.”

“I haven’t fallen off a mountain, merely come up one to stay a while.”

“You’re living at the facility now?”

“I could hardly meet with you daily if I wasn’t.”

“Daily. Somebody with deep pockets likes me.”

“Deep pockets?”

He rubbed his fingers together. They ached, but were more flexible than yesterday. “Gelt.”

She nodded. “Mr. Randolph . . . senior . . . spares no expense on your account.”

He eyed her mouth. “He’s a discerning old gentleman.”

“You Americans! You’re such serious flirters.”

“Flirts,” he corrected. Her response to colloquialisms was totally European.

“Flirts. You have a seriously bruised spine; two pins in your fractured legs underneath those casts; a concussion at the back of your skull; a skinned cheek. And a memory as solid as a, a . . .”

“Sieve,” he suggested.

“A seine, I was about to say. A fishing net.”

“A sieve is for flour. It’s finer.”

“You can be quite the pessimist.”

“Realist.”

“Really, Mr. Randolph. You need to get serious and help me to help you. Has anything about the accident come to mind?”

He checked the internal data bank. “Nothing. Except—”

“Except.”

“I hit a cliff. A high, solid cliff.”

It was true. He’d just had a flash of that dark looming wall. Yet a mountain cliff ought to be white. And the object of his mental impact was black. And reflective. Black ice.

“That’s good.” She was leaning forward, watching him intently. “Something has come back.”

The tremor of excitement in her voice echoed in his chest. If only he could trust her. He needed a coach, a passionate partner in his recovery. No. Not trustworthy. No one here was, except for Garry. Garry. Gary, Indiana, Gary, Indiana . . . it was some silly song. Garry. The name was all right, but he remembered the man by something else. A nickname? Ga . . . Gan . . . Ga! The memory search was painful.

She was removing his hand from his forehead, her face very close. European women wore perfume like mink wore pheromones, as an alluring personal miasma, touched at all the pulse points. His senses were spinning between pain and pleasure.

“Don’t think too hard. Your brain can’t take it yet. Let the memories flow. Don’t even say them aloud yet.”

Not self-serving advice for an undercover interrogator, if she indeed was one.

But a ring of pressure around his brow was pounding. Thinking had become a painful process. Jerky. Unreliable. He sensed that he had once moved like coiled steel, had thought as hot and fast as sheet lightning. Not now. Not . . . yet.

She’d put his suddenly trembling hand on her knee, covered in silky, opaque hose, her other hand atop it.

Was she seducing him, or saving him? And did he care which?

He loved the game of wondering, he understood almost at once. A worthy opponent. He loved the edge of fighting his own mind and body for supremacy. Or dueling a sexy, dangerous woman.

Maybe he was inventing a sinister history for her. Or himself. She was too obviously attractive to trust. Apparently, he distrusted fair surfaces most of all. Why?

“You can’t expect to climb the wall of your mind in one day,” she was saying.

It was an apt metaphor. He had a long climb back ahead of him.

His fingers flexed in the sandwiched warmth of her knee and hand.

“You hurt,” she said. “All over. Everything. It’s to be expected from an accident so severe. Better?’

He flexed his fingers again. He could feel her thigh muscles tense under them. Smooth, strong. As he would be again.

Ministering angel, detached professional, enemy in his weakest moments?

“Not . . . yet.”

Her lips made a small moue, that subtly French expression. A French twist of the lips.

He felt a sudden pang. Mental not physical. He knew it was a warning from deep in his unremembered past.

Was it . . . worry? Danger? Or . . . guilt?

If Temple’s fingernails were bitable, she would have nibbled them off on the long, bouncing drive into the dark of desert. But they were disgustingly strong and her current coat of nail polish always wore out before they did.

Trying to read the map screen on Van’s dashboard, while jolting over obscure roads was like translating Sanskrit when you didn’t even know Latin.

“I’m really not sure why we’re all rushing to a murder scene at a bordello,” Temple said.

“It could be fun?” Electra suggested. “I kinda got into crime-solving at that Red Hat Sisterhood convention. We really should have called my Red-Hatted League chapter members in on this. We were a great team.”

“No.” Van wrestled the wheel around a tight curve and slowed down. “The fewer people who know about this the better. There it is.”

Kit and Electra craned their necks over the front seat backs to stare through the middle of the windshield.

A cluster of gleaming yellow and blue lights glittered like an electric oasis in the dark.

“They must have their own generator and well out here,” Van murmured. “They’d have to be totally independent operationally. And the cell phone limitations wouldn’t bother them.”

“Why not?” asked Kit, the New Yorker who was always plugged into something. “Oh! Right. They wouldn’t want customers getting rung during interesting moments.”

“They must have some reliable way of communicating,” Electra said. “They have to make appointments and such.”

“Awesome,” Kit said. “Imagine men driving all the way out to this wilderness to get a little nookie. This is the real West!”

“It’s an adventure,” Van said. “Some customers don’t feel satisfied with entertainment that’s too easy to come by. The Strip has everything at hand. Coming out here feels special. It’s a marketing ploy. What’s hard to get is better.”

“How can sex for sale in Las Vegas be hard to get?” Electra wondered.

“Harder,” Van explained with a smile in her voice. “Selling sizzle is always a mystical process.”

“I suppose,” Kit said, “that what Minnesota-born and bred girls like Temple and me will have to keep in mind, when we see our intendeds in the ambiance of a brothel, is that such establishments are perfectly legal here.”

“What you and Temple have to keep in mind,” Van said grimly, “is that our nearest and dearest were kidnapped to this slightly seedy environment . . . and immediately phoned home to us for help.”

“Yeah,” Electra said, “but that was only aftera dead body turned up.”

“So says the cynic,” Temple put in, “the five-times-married woman. I can promise you that Matt would have never gone willingly along with this prank.”

“Nor Nicky,” Van said.

There was a silence.

“I’m not sure about Aldo,” Kit said, “which is what makes him so interesting. I can hardly wait to confront the dirty dog and extract suitable promises of ‘making it up to me.’”

Temple sighed. They could joke about it, but this jaunt to a bachelor party had turned into a very sticky wicket. How was she going to clear everybody’s favorite guy in less than twenty-four hours when they were dealing with a totally unknown cast of possible victims and predators?

Van nudged her knee. “We are going in there like gang-busters. We control the vertical and horizontal. They will all do as we say while we sort things out. Girls who are bridesmaids or bedmates, boys who are the innocent ours. We either run the investigation or we call in the police, right?”

Temple winced at the idea of calling in the police, which to her always meant surrendering to Lieutenant Molina.

But Electra pounded Van’s headrest with a woman-power fist. “We are Charlie’s Angels on the case!”

“Without a Charlie to dictate to us,” Temple said. “We are the dictators. Way better.”

“Way!” all three women shouted.

Van squealed the Rover around the last driveway curve its bright headlights illuminated, and they pulled up under the huge neon image of a sapphire-blue high-heeled slipper.

Matt had observed the change of power in the Sapphire Slipper’s parlor with a certain regret.

True, he’d held a Fontana brother’s Beretta in his hand and had prevailed, but what use was taking over this scene when every woman in the place, and he especially, was a suspect for a particularly awful killing?

He’d watched a few of the TV forensics shows he could stomach.

Women were usually the victims; men were usually the killers.

He knew enough of the secular world now to know the earmarks of a sex killing: a sex industry woman stalked, controlled, brutally murdered. The setup was perfect. All these young bachelors out on the town for a night. The predictable implication of an orgy here in Nevada, the only place in the nation where illicit sex was legal.

A notorious local “family” up to their silk pocket scarves in murder most premarital.

A girl dead in salacious TV show-style: semiclothed, an elaborately erotic setting, costume and makeup by the Marquis de Sade.

Matt shuddered at the implied inhumanity of it all. Camera-ready.

And him a prime suspect, all because he’d opted not to be a Peeping Tom.

If only he had looked! Seen the crime and the criminal.

But no. He’d dutifully turned off the window on mayhem. Made himself into a suspect. And now Nicky was jubilant that his wife, Van, and her friends Kit and Electra and Temple, were coming here to the Sapphire Slipper brothel, to sort things out.

Oh. My. God.

The fact that Midnight Louie, Temple’s cat, was here for some bizarre reason and rubbing back and forth on his pant leg was minuscule comfort.

If the big tomcat was sympathizing with his plight, he was in deep trouble.

His alibi was so hard to explain. Trapped in a brothel bedroom, he’d retreated to a built-in watching and listening post . . . and promptly disabled any watching and listening, so he knew nothing of the murder that had transpired afterward.

Either he was a totally naive ass, or not a red-blooded human male.

Or both.

Matt couldn’t decide which role was worse: innocent or prude.

If only he had decided to take advantage of the admittedly embarrassing situation to live and learn.

He might have stopped the murder. Caught the killer.

That fact that he hadn’t felt worse than being a Peeping Tom.

A little scandalous curiosity could have saved a life.

Instead, a murderer had made him an unwilling accessory, by default.

A murderer had made him very angry. Righteously angry.

They were stuck here.

They were supposed to let Temple and her crew solve this mess.

Matt would be happy about that, but he’d be even happier if he took a hand in the investigation and found the killer himself. The killer who’d made him an impotent nonwitness.

Whoever had done it had malice aforethought toward the victim, and maybe malice toward every man and woman in this house of prostitution, whether unwillingly hijacked, or not. A disgruntled client? A sex pervert? Or something tragic, like a family member unable to accept a relative’s working in the sex industry. He’d heard it all on his radio advice show.

It had been planned, beyond the bridesmaids’ wildest schemes. Perhaps that very reservation had given the killer the idea for hiding a murder in the tangled webs of a silly prenup-tial prank.

And it mattered that this was a bachelor party.

That had something to do with the motive and the means.

Matt may be an amateur at bachelor parties and bridal parties and brothels, but he knew a thing or two about murder from Temple.

He’d do everything he could to help her, as she would to help him.

But that might not be enough.

The murderer might be way out of their league.

They both might be too innocent for this situation, this conspiracy.

He’d have to get savvy fast.

“Okay,” Temple said as the Range Rover cooled its engine in front of the brothel’s well-lit porte cochere, “we need a plan. We need to divide and conquer, given that we’re dealing with multiple suspects here. And we need to find out about any support personnel for the brothel. There must be a madam, for one. And a cook and bottle-washer.

“Van, you get the brothers Fontana and Uncle Mario. You and Nicky should be able to corral them, and they look like the least likely suspects, having been handcuffed from arrival until after the body was found. Barring a Houdini among them, they’re in a fairly good position.

“Electra, you’re the JP. You’ve had to deal with a lot of nervous brides, so you bird-dog this gaggle of eight bridesmaids for eight brothers, who have demonstrated a lot of nerve, including confiscating serious weapons. One of them could have used this wacky scheme to cover a murder.

“Kit, you’re the veteran actress and jaded New Yorker. I hereby bequeath to you the madam and the house hookers. I’m sure you’ve seen it all, or at least acted it. If one of them recognized an opportunity for murder, and took it, I’m sure you can sniff out the guilty party.”

“And you?” Van asked.

“I need to consult with Nicky and Matt about the scene of the crime, and on their own nebulous movements while hiding out of sight, out of mind, although it is hard to imagine either of those gentlemen being out of mind with all those loose women around. Though I may be prejudiced on this subject.”

“Not at all,” Van said. “Hiding those two good-lookers in a whorehouse would be a real trick.”

“‘Loose’ women?” Electra asked. “Isn’t that a prejudicial description for a legal profession in Nevada?”

“I was thinking of the screw-loose bridesmaids,” Temple said. “They’ve made a royal mess out of trying to have some serious fun with the groomsmen. Somehow their crazy-brained daisy-chain scheme allowed a murderer a free hand to commit the perfect crime. No matter how bizarre the setting and the scheme that got everyone here, the murder sounds like the usual sordid and awful business.

“Everybody ready for her assignment? We’ll have to consult periodically. We’ll also need to confine each group so no one can confer without one of us overhearing. It’s going to be a long night’s journey into noon tomorrow, to paraphrase an O’Neill play title. And if we don’t find a likely suspect, the police will charge us all with failure to report a crime. If Lieutenant C. R. Molina has anything to do with it, she just may do that anyway.

“Are we ready? Let’s rock and roll.”

Temple had never been inside a brothel before. She hadn’t even been to a Chippendale’s male strip show. She had no idea what to expect.

They walked into what seemed like the set for a play, a stuffy, period play like Life with Father, some fussy turn-of-the-twentieth-century Victorian parlor tricked out all in shades of blue.

One really crowded Victorian parlor!

Temple felt like singing part of the famous Christmas carol: twelve shady ladies, ten studly brothers, eight ditsy bridesmaids, four addled sleuths, three senior citizens, two roaming lads, and a cat in a sable-fur ruff. . . .

A cat? Black yet? Louie, wherefore art thou, Louie?

Not here at the moment, thank God and Bast. This was a fluffy bordello cat with green-gold eyes.

Temple recognized Uncle Mario, perching his bulk uneasily on a velvet-tufted chair next to a heavyset woman dressed up like Mae West in corseted glitter. And a second late-middle-aged person wearing a starched collared man’s shirt with a garter on one upper arm and black trousers. Part woman, part man? Part bartender, piano player, dealer, or what?

For the overall atmosphere was Old West saloon. And the “girls” arrayed along one wall were a curled and feathered bevy all in blue, every shade of blue imaginable, from the faint saccharine hues to midnight velvet. And each woman along the spectrum ran the gamut from young and fresh to older and wiser and ready for every implication of midnight blue the law allowed.

It was all legal, and Temple thought it should be outlawed.

Back when she was a TV reporter, she’d run into the tawdry statistics about the sex trade. The “goods” were all spoiled. Strippers. Hookers. Many models. Childhood physical, verbal, and sexual abuse were the guaranteed ingredients that led girls and boys to the sleazy and often self-destructive side of the street. They may proclaim they worked this profession from free will, but their wills and self-esteem had been shaped by trauma most people never had to confront.

Selling oneself still was tragic, and Temple would bet that the reason for the dead woman upstairs would prove to be the result of some perverse, pathetic past, for both victim and murderer.

That concluded, she dismissed her gut reaction.

She had to keep an open mind to dig deep into this culture to find the twisted reason behind the crime.

So. Where were the prime suspects?

Nicky and Matt.

“We’re not making progress with your memory,” Dr. Schneider announced at her next visit.

A genuine assessment or a clever interrogator sensing his suspicions?

“Come, Mr. Randolph, stop glaring at me! I know you’re impatient. Those casts must be as itchy as hell, and you’re obviously not a man used to being pent up.”

Reading and reflecting his emotional mood. Intuitive? Or manipulative?

“Bottled up, maybe?” She smiled shrewdly. “Is that the proper expression? You don’t like your emotions to be obvious or to be read. Am I in your bad graces for noticing?”

“I didn’t know I had any bad graces.”

Her smile deepened. “Very few, but you’ve always known that. I’m glad that you remember enough to be suave.”

“Thank you.”

“I have decided to try a mnemonic device. Just a little game. It might . . . crack . . . some unconscious memories loose.”

“Isn’t that a bad thing to go poking around in, the unconscious?”

“I don’t know. Is it in your case?”

“I’m not a ‘case.’ ”

She shifted in her chair uneasily. “You’re quite right. I apologize.”

She folded her hands in her lap. She wore the shortest skirts of any doctor he’d seen, even on Grey’s Anatomy commercial clips. He wouldn’t dream of watching that show, not even now that he was a hospital habitué. Lord, he was starting to think in French words! The woman was a venereal disease, easily transferable.

He decided to put her on notice. “I apologize. I didn’t mean to imply I expected more than the usual medical abracadabra from you, shrink or not.”

“‘Shrink’?”

“Like your skirt. Very skimpy. Miniaturized. Reduced from the normal size. It comes from the cannibal habit of shrinking the heads of their dead enemies. An American expression.”

“You like my skirt?”

“I shouldn’t? Why else do you wear it? Not for me, of course, but for men. All these poor, mentally confused men. You are quite the tease, Doctor.”

“Most of my patients are too devastated to notice what I wear. Besides, are you so sure I’m not wearing what I do just for you?”

He snorted. “Those are three-thousand-dollar suits. You have them altered to your preferences. You were in bed with those suits long before you came to my bedside.”

“Why not a special wardrobe for you? You are an obviously wealthy man. An adventurer. Charismatic. Oh, yes, you are, and you know it. My parents were civil servants. Why shouldn’t I set my chapeau for you? Your mind is muddled. Any women you knew or loved are forgotten. Certainly none has appeared here to succor you in your illness. As far as I’m concerned, you may be the world’s most eligible bachelor, and therefore, worth flashing.”

He laughed. “You earned an advanced degree. You get paid plenty for your expertise and time. You know your way around the male ego, and inside a subconscious, not to mention a conscience. You don’t need anyone, least of all me, ogling your knees. You like being an attractive woman, period. The reasons for that would be something I might like to explore, had I the time. Perhaps it was the low expectations of those civil servant parents.”

“And your parents?”

“The American equivalent of civil servants.”

He knew that was true, but not why it came out and sounded so right. And why he felt a sharp pang of failure and shame at mentioning his parents. And how he could have disguised that emotional weakness fast enough for her, which he hadn’t.

“You are, you know,” she said softly.

“Are what?” His pulse was pounding. What was he? What had he done to feel this wave of self-disgust and guilt? He was glad his face was scabbed, it might hide the inner turmoil better.

“Charismatic,” she said. “Perhaps I should excuse myself from your . . . service,” she added, avoiding the word case. “I am here to help, not irritate. Not to tease, and I have been, a little.”

“What would be ‘a lot’ for you?”

Her laughter was free, loose, and apparently genuine. “I can only think of teasing answers to that.” He found her knowing hazel eyes irresistible, and scary.

“How about,” she went on, “I ask you these long-established psychologically analytical questions, and you can have some fun at my expense? You will enjoy exercising your brain and your suspicions.”

“What is this?”

“Free association.”

“No associations are free,” he said, dead serious.

“Ah. I agree. The purpose of this exercise is to startle your mind into remembering. Perhaps you don’t wish that process to be shared. I could leave you the list, and you could . . . play with it mentally.”

And take those lovely legs away? Not to mention the lovely acrobatics she was putting his mind through?

“I’m cool with it.”

“ ‘Cool.’ Americans are always ‘cool’ with everything. All right. I start now. Freedom.”

“No such thing. A common illusion.”

“Responsibility.”

“A snare and a delusion, and a major necessity for a human conscience.”

“Everest.”

“High and mighty.”

“Women.”

“Warm.”

“Horses.”

“Big, beautiful, and stupid.”

“Money.”

“Useful.”

“Father.”

“Priest.”

Her eyebrows raised. So did his. “Where did that come from?”

“Mountains.”

“Molehills.”

“Love.”

“Loss.” Another telling answer. He saw her tuck that away.

“Trust.”

“Virtue.”

“Mirror.”

“Deception.”

“Woman.”

“Dangerous.” Her eyes were gleaming with psychiatrist’s fool’s gold: glints of supposed insight.

“Man.”

“Original sin.”

She looked up. “Not woman? It was Eve who ate the apple.”

“A secure man isn’t led into anything against his conscience by anyone. Adam was the weaker one.”

“War.”

“Senseless. But we all know that. Which makes it even more senseless.”

“Champagne.”

“Could use some about now.”

She laughed and uncrossed her knees, putting her clipboard on the foot of the bed.

“So could I, Mr. Randolph. You have given me some very contradictory answers.”

“You can’t smuggle any champagne in wearing that skirt.”

“I will come next time in an inexpensive peasant dirndl skirt to my ankles, with champagne. Would that do?”

He shook his head. “One would ruin the other.”

“You don’t compromise well.”

“Do you?”

She eyed him hard. “No.”

Then she stood. “I’ll leave to contemplate your answers. I think you should do so as well. They are most interesting. But, then, I expected no less, and I know you wish to anticipate and meet my expectations in every way.”

She was saying she knew he wouldn’t tell her anything substantive? That he suspected her validity?

Or was she just flirting again? Damn, that was fun. He must have been celibate for a while before his accident. A flash of guilt again. Yes, he had been. And the guilt? That hadn’t been fair to someone. A woman. Woman. Warm. Was that the woman who evoked that word?

Woman. Dangerous. He’d been thinking of Revienne, flirting back a bit, but he felt another twinge of warning. He’d known a very dangerous woman. Maybe more than one, if he was the undercover agent Garry Randolph hinted he’d been. Garry Randolph!

That name was so familiar and yet not quite right. Grand was the missing word, maybe. A pseudonym? Garry Grand? Gandy. Gandhi?

Answers were dancing like a cloud of annoying gnats flitting in front of his eyes.

Almost he could name them, each and every one of those trembling motes.

But he couldn’t catch and trap and fix a word on a single gnat.

Miss Kitty, the madam, introduced the place’s cook-bartender-piano player, Phylliss Shoofly.

Temple winced to recognize a play on the name of that right-wing Madonna of rectitude, Phyllis Schlafly. The pun was similar to porn performers’ names Temple had run across. Velva Dixon, for instance. Or H. V. Load.

Phylliss looked like lesbian muscle. Every brothel needed one.

Temple rolled her eyes to think of Matt wandering around in this palace of subculture and the sex trade. Way more than he’d bargained for on a simple jaunt to a bachelor party.

First, to put this cast of dozens in their proper holding tanks.

“Let’s be sexist about assigning rooms to our suspects,” Temple said. “Van, you round up everything with the last name of Fontana in the bar area. Electra, you herd the bridesmaids into the kitchen. Kit, you and Miss Kitty and Miss Shoofly can stay here in the parlor with the resident ladies.”

“Where will you be?” Kit asked.

“Upstairs, in my ladies’ chambers.”

As Temple turned, she jerked to glimpse Midnight Louie sitting in the archway. No . . . this was a fluffier, smaller black cat with halo of turquoise marabou for a ruff. What was the lurking Louie up to? Not like him to avoid the spotlight. Had he seen this hotsy-totsy house cat named Baby Blue? Probably. Maybe he was like any human male in a bordello distracted from business by the scenery. Heck, that was why the men went there!

Temple moved into the foyer to take the front stairs and spotted the two missing men sitting together on the top step, neither looking distracted by courtesans. In fact, both looked equally grim and chagrined.

Matt took Temple’s hand to steady her as she sat on the steps below them. All this excitement on top of a few glasses of champagne was wearing.

“Nicky Fontana,” she said, “what makes you think I can find a murderer in this mess?”

“I need you to?” When Temple was silent, he added, “Matt needs you to?”

Temple glowered. “What’s all this about Matt being in danger of imminent arrest? Are you trying to panic me?”

“It’s true,” Matt put in. “I ended up hiding from the armed and dangerous bridesmaids in the one room that produced a dead body.”

“So you witnessed the murder?”

“No.”

“So you heard the murder?”

“No.”

“Yet you were there?”

He nodded miserably.

“What is this: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil? You admit you were in the room.”

“Not quite, Temple. I was in an adjacent . . . chamber.”

She glanced at Nicky. “Just how kinky was this room setup anyway? ‘Chamber’?”

“A voyeur’s room,” he answered. “Two-way mirrored wall.”

Temple drilled Matt with another disbelieving look. “Then you could at least see something even if the ‘viewing chamber’ was soundproof.”

“ ‘Viewing chamber’ sounds so funereal,” he objected. “No, I couldn’t see anything because I shut the interior blinds. I was as good as blind and deaf, and while I was waiting in the dark, someone brought that poor girl into the outer room and strangled her with a fishnet stocking.”

“Do you have any idea how long you were in there?”

Matt glanced at the inexpensive stainless-steel watch on his left wrist. “Doesn’t glow in the dark. Felt like the anteroom of eternity.”

Temple eyed Nick Fontana. His watch was a Rolex and had dials inside of dials on the watch face and a bunch of indiscreet diamonds scattered here and there.

“Mine glows in the dark as well as prepares sushi,” he admitted. “We both hid out for half an hour. We heard the patter of high-heeled feet coming and dove for the most concealing place possible. Matt happened to be near one of the kinkier setups when the bridesmaid and hooker posse arrived, that’s all.”

“And where were you?”

“In the hall linen closet. It was extremely commodious, as you can imagine, and soft. I also could hear gales of girlish laughter as the ‘good’ girls inspected the nightly haunts of the ‘bad’ girls.”

“You Fontana boys always land on your assets,” Temple grumbled. She turned to Matt. “If only you had one perverted bone in your body, you could have peeked.”

“I know! I blew it. I might have saved her life.”

Temple didn’t have an answer to that truly tragic possibility.

“Maybe not,” Nicky said.

They both stared at him while he explained.

“It was pretty populous up there for over a half an hour while the ‘bad’ girls were showing the ‘good’ girls around. It was like a sorority house giggle-in. I’m guessing that someone dragged the dead girl into a room everyone had already looked at, and strangled her. After everyone was through ‘inspecting,’ the killer dumped her on the bed so it would confuse the time of death and who had done it.”

“You’re assuming one of the other women did.”

“Maybe not. We two guys were roaming around up here undetected. Why not some other guy, someone who knew the place a lot better than we did?”

“The only guys present here now—and then—were the ones trucked in by Gangsters. And how was that managed anyway?”

“The drivers were switched,” Matt said. “No one would notice through the heavy tint glass on the exterior and interior limo windows. When we arrived here and went in, Nicky and I were the last to leave the limo. By the time we hit the foyer, we saw something was wrong inside the place. We tried to duck back outside to regroup, except the ‘chauffeur’ was waiting just outside the closed front door to discourage us with a big automatic weapon.” He glanced at Nicky. “What would you say it was?”

“I thought an Uzi at the time, but since the driver wore nothing but black fishnet stockings, black high heels, a black jacket, and visored cap, I wasn’t exactly registering the make and model of the weapon she was toting. Her legs, however, were extremely high caliber.”

Temple grimaced. “Good thing Van isn’t hearing this sexist—and worse, useless—evaluation. Did the driver rejoin the bridesmaids’ ranks?”

Nicky and Matt exchanged a look and shrugged as one.

“We weren’t downstairs after that to count noses,” Matt said.

“I’m presuming there are eight bridesmaids, but whether the driver was one, I don’t know,” Nicky added. “My brothers’ girlfriends come and go.”

“Probably why this set has contracted wedding fever now that Aldo has broken custom and popped the Big Question.”

“I’ve been married forever,” Nicky objected, “and that never motivated my brothers’ girlfriends to go nuptial.”

“It’s the fever of the fresh catch,” Temple said. “Aldo is also the oldest, thus the most confirmed bachelor. If he goes—”

“So could the whole tribe.” Matt nodded sagely. “It’s a form of mob hysteria.”

“Don’t mention ‘mob,’ ” Nicky said with a superstitious shudder. “There’s a hidden planet here. Those girls could have been egged on, unbeknownst to themselves, by one of Uncle Mario’s rivals. Fontana family public embarrassment would not only be satisfying, but would put us all under a microscope and severely hamper our lifestyles.”

Temple clapped a hand to her forehead. “So we not only have loony lady friends, but opportunistic rivals. It makes more sense that a rival crime family murdered an innocent bystander to put the Fontanas in hot water than a miffed girlfriend going overboard at a hokey-jokey bachelor party and strangling a strange woman. The first thing is to identify the victim. I suppose I’d better see her.”

Each room had its own indented entryway, so the various doors were not visible from staring down the long, half-lit hallway. When Matt and Nicky led Temple to the murder room, she gave a little jump to see a tall, pale figure on guard at the door.

“No ghost,” Nicky said. “Just Emilio. I thought having someone guard the body was a good idea. We shouldn’t cross the threshold because of compromising the evidence more than it already is. Can you see enough to be useful?”

Temple had leaned inside to crane her neck left and right, and down and up, avoiding the bed and its occupant.

“That huge mirror wall in the rococo frame is the one that’s see-through from the other side?”

“Yes,” Matt said. “It’s a small room, maybe eight-by-ten, with mini-blinds on the inside window. There’s a table with a low-level lamp. And a chair. I sat on it; but it felt creepy.”

“Kind of like taking a seat in a porno movie house,” Nicky suggested. “Not that I frequent such places,” he added quickly.

“Like any place illicit,” Matt said, “it had a nasty feel to it.”

“So you stood?” Temple asked.

“No. I moved to sit against one wall. I didn’t need or want to see anything through that secret window.”

“Was the floor carpeted, like the bedroom?”

Matt thought. “Yes, I guess. It wasn’t cold anyway.”

“It wouldn’t be,” Nicky said, “out here in the desert, but the steel-blue carpeting continued through the false baseboard on the section of wall that was a hidden door. How’d you find it?”

“The seam was a bit off. And I was desperate. Those women hooting up a storm in the hall were heading my way. I had no idea proper young women could be so rowdy, and bawdy.”

“Oh, Matt,” Temple said, “they probably ate up a tour of a bordello by its residents the way I’d devour a backstage tour of a major Vegas magic show. I’m a little weird that way, preferring magicians’ illusions to peeks into a bordello. Women find ‘naughty’ very interesting.”

“Men too,” Nicky added.

Matt said nothing, just sighed pointedly.

Temple studied the room. “Definitely on the kinky side. You’re sure the mirror above the bed is not see-through?”

“No,” Matt and Nicky said in unison.

“No, or not sure?”

“It’s pretty irrelevant. When I found Matt in here bending over the girl on the bed, doing CPR,” Nicky said, “I just checked on her condition, dead, and his, in shock, and got us the hell out of there.”

“What did you learn from bending over her?” Temple asked Matt.

“That her eyes were blue, to match the decorating scheme. Maybe it was a color-coordinated murder. And the thin black scarf around her throat flared at the ends so I could see it was a fishnet stocking. They are stockings, aren’t they, not panty hose?”

“I’m not an expert on fishnet stockings,” Temple said. “They have a long rep as sexy entertainer accessories, on the trashy side, although they came back into high fashion briefly a couple of years ago. The manufacturers are always trying to get women back into hose again, even in this suffocatingly hot climate. Didn’t work with me.”

“Does with Van,” Nicky said. “She’s an executive woman; dresses to the nines.”

“I dress to the Easy Eights,” Temple said with a smile, offering her bare calf and foot in its medium-heeled mule.

“Speaking of the Not-Easy Eights,” Nicky said, “we need to discover if this corpse is one of my brothers’ significant others, or one of the resident ladies.”

“The madam didn’t recognize her.”

“Okay, she might be somebody entirely unknown, but then how did she end up here?”

“How did most of us?” Temple asked. “You twelve guys were hijacked.”

“An imported body,” Nicky mused. “That’s kinky. I suppose she could have been imported in the limo trunk without anyone the wiser. Where do you hide a semi-naked dead woman you want to ditch?”

Matt added, “We need to identify her. Is she known to the people who are here now? Not that they wouldn’t lie. How can we try to identify her without entering the room again?”

Nicky flourished his cell phone, hit a button and rapidly clicked through close-up and distant photos of the seminude dead woman. “While I was guiding you out of the crime scene, I took these. You were pretty stunned. Giving CPR to an almost nude dead woman would do that. Damn cell phone may not get great signals way out here, but the photo feature works swell.”

Temple shivered to see the woman’s features close up in the small screen, as blank of expression as a doll’s face. She was young and pretty enough to be either a sex-for-hire object of desire, or a Fontana girlfriend. Such a waste.

“First thing,” Nicky said, “I’m going to search around here for her clothes. I doubt she arrived here undressed, and even a resident would start with more than some inciting lingerie at least. Maybe she was undressed just before, or after, her murder.”

“Why?” Matt asked, appalled.

“Confuses the issue of who she . . . was,” Temple said, “and therefore, who might have killed her. Whoever did it must have acted on impulse. You couldn’t set up a situation like this.”

“Well,” Nicky pointed out, “eight vengeful bridesmaids did. Maybe one of them figured she could off a rival while she was at it.”

“But your brothers surely weren’t ever customers here?”

Nicky frowned at Temple. “I’d say no, they don’t have to patronize brothels. But there are a lot of them and I certainly don’t keep up with their entertainment and personal lives.”

“And there’s always Uncle Mario,” Matt put in.

“Of course!” Temple eyed Nicky. “An older man might need more . . . exotic stimulation.”

“Hey. I do not speculate about my uncle Mario’s affairs, criminal or personal. You’d have to ask him.”

“Or the madam,” Temple said hopefully, trying to avoid a fate worse than death, a fate that might bedeath if she inquired too much into Macho Mario’s virility. “That Miss Kitty is getting to be on friendly terms with him, come to think of it. I’ve spotted them canoodling in the bar.”

“You’re the detective,” Nicky told her. “Your fiance and I are your prime suspects and none of my family is absolved. Go to it. Dig up all the dirt on all and sundry that you can.”

My worst nightmare has come true.

I am trapped in a strange place by a gang of three.

I have no escape route, no allies, no alternatives.

I have been hounded upstairs, where I had hoped to take a restoring snooze in the establishment’s linen closet while I let my little gray cells get cooking on a subconscious level.

Unfortunately, a closet is a cul-de-sac.

My back is to the wall.

My front is to a trio of female relatives on the warpath who have tracked me down and used their carnivore claws to pull the door to my sanctuary wide and now stand shoulder to shoulder like linebackers to ensure that I am going nowhere except where they say.

Now I know how the Fontana brothers have been feeling all evening.

Only my pursuing Furies are all feline and all claws and teeth.

“There he is!” they howl as one.

“Sonny,” cries a voice. (That one is okay. It was the moniker of a mob guy in The Godfather.)

“Daddy,” cries another voice in syrupy, sarcastic tones. (That one is not okay. I am not a family guy unless it is spelled with a capital F as in fierce, fearless, feline, footloose, and fancy-free.)

Alas, I am not footloose and fancy-free now, for a third yowl comes: “Lover boy.”

What is a guy to do, held hostage in a house of pleasure along with a lot of other dudes?

Rolling over and playing dead is not an option.

I fan my shivs and snick them back into their sheaths. “Ladies, please. There is enough of me to go around.”

“In your dreams,” jeers Midnight Louise.

“You could use a street diet and some sparring time,” Ma Barker says.

“You are a one-queen kind of guy, I know it,” Miss Satin says, all moony-eyed.

Oh, Cheese Whiz! Here I am, trapped, caught between three generations of clinging females. At least I am outdoing the Fontana boys all by my lonesome self. At least only one of these dames has any serious designs on me.

One is bad enough.

I had better get some designs of my own on them. Quick!

He hadn’t wanted to trouble the old man. He knew he was being watched by a lot of people, people patients weren’t expected to notice, like cleaning personnel, nursing aides, certainly Mademoiselle Fraulein Doctor Schneider. He was also going crazy kept down and inactive by these damnable casts. Did he really need them? Were they a ploy to keep him prisoner?

Then the memory of his body soaring toward that shiny black wall from unsupported space returned. He was lucky to be alive. Like a drunk driver, she’d said, too out of it to tense up and get really hurt. He wheeled himself to the window, back and forth, a form of pacing he couldn’t manage physically.

Was he really that in command of his mind and body, enough to convert that fatal hit into a minor accident? Certainly he hadn’t managed to keep his memory. But memory loss in severe accidental injuries is common. What wasn’t normal, at least for his expectations; it wasn’t coming back. The memory. His legs weren’t the problem. He was relatively young. They’d heal. He was an athlete of sorts, even if he didn’t buy the role of mountain climber.

He expected more from his memory. From himself. Damn it! Now was not the time to have a little brain crash! He paused to stare up at the postcard peaks rising like a colossal shark’s maws around him. He shivered. Cold. Icy. Killing. Everything he didn’t like in a landscape. Everything he didn’t like in a woman.

Temple moved on to the parlor, where Kit had corralled the Sapphire Slipper’s staff.

Kit came snowshoeing over the thick wool carpet to Temple like a happy puppy.

“I’ve been getting acquainted with the girls,” she whispered. “What a tragicomic bunch of life stories! They’re a whole play by Eugene O’Neill via Neil Simon. They make A Chorus Line look like Little Orphan Annie. I’m getting an idea for a revue here. A play. A novel!

“A bunch of women are trapped in snowstorm in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, only it’s in Nevada—maybe the mountains, there’s snow there, right?—and there are no men in the cast. Just the women talking: whores and wives and would-be wives. Wolves howling in the distance—”

“A perfect offstage role for the Fontana pack,” Temple interrupted.

“Wolves? No, these would be real wolf voices, tribal brutality at bay, the Taliban, maybe—”

“Kit, I hate to derail the creative muse when it’s mingling Medea with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum with White Fang, but I just learned something pretty awful, and—worse—maybe relevant.”

“About what?”

“About who,” Temple whispered, grabbing her aunt’s thin wrist and pulling her into the archway to the bar, where Fontana Inc. awaited under the supervision of Van von Rhine. “The girlfriends said Aldo’s significant other died a year ago. She was an aerial performer and fell during practice. Broke her neck. Did you know that?”

Kit had sobered instantly, plunging from creative mania into deep concern.

“Yes. He told me, of course. He said he liked that I did something safe. What could happen to a writer?”

“No wonder the poor man freaked when you were mistaken for me at the Red Hat Sisterhood convention and attacked with a garrote.”

“I think that only made both of us realize we didn’t want to be apart.”

“Maybe you’re not so safe. We assumed you were attacked because you wore a pink hat and are my physical double.”

“Yeah?”

“But what if it was because you were seeing Aldo morning, noon, and midnight?”

Kit had always been a fast study. She bit her lip and looked around the not-so-innocent rooms that surrounded them. “That’s what you learned from interviewing the Fontana brothers’ ditsy girlfriends?”

Temple nodded. “Maybe one’s not so ditsy, but got fixated on Aldo—”

“Maybe crazy like a fox.” Kit nodded too. “Maybe you better interview these real ‘foxes’ fast to get an idea of what’s really going on in this henhouse.”

“Maybe, and amen.”

Temple adjourned to the bar off the parlor with a sense of relief, probably false. She felt on common ground here, however bizarre the situation.

A sober group of men surrounded several of the round tables, sitting on leather club chairs.

The liquor labels fronting the mirrored back of the bar were all high-end. Heavy crystal ashtrays suitable for cigars centered every polished tiger-maple tabletop.

Temple would have to say that if she were a resident sizing up the night’s customers, she’d be one happy hooker. Matt’s Polish-blond hair stood out among the dark Italian ones like a headlight, but not one guy here was shabby, including Uncle Mario, whose teeth were as snow-white as his silk tie against a black shirt. The man’s old-style gangster look made portly into muscle and balding into moneyed.

The younger Fontanas were hipper in every respect, but still radiated a slightly Old World air of elaborate courtesy that won over women everywhere.

Van von Rhine was the other blonde in the room, and Temple had missed seeing her at first. She was perched on a navy leather barstool and had faded into the faceted glitter of the mirrored bottles behind her.

After Temple had surveyed the scene, Van waved her over. “How’s it going?”

“I’m learning a lot about hordes of strangers.” Temple joined Van at the bar, deciding that an elevated seat would command more attention from this armada of men.

She skillfully hopped up via the crossbar, which anyone who is five feet tall masters early. She felt like a judge at a bench, which was just the inner buttressing she needed to play the authority card here.

“You seem one short.”

They frowned, straightening their ties and their postures.

“Not short in height, in number.”

Emilio dashed around the archway. “Sorry, I just heard from, er, Fifi, that it was the guys’ turn for grilling.”

“Who’s guarding the murder room door?” Nicky asked as their uncle nodded with grave disapproval.

“Um, three of the girls. That way they watch one another. I’ll get back up there as soon as Miss Temple lets me go.”

And she bet that he was a lot more eager to pass the time with three courtesans than here.

Smiling at the tables, she said, “I’ll need to use you guys as a sounding board. First, I’d like your impression of how the abduction was managed, and what you all did, and where, when you arrived here.”

There was the expected universal, awkward silence.

“Did any of you suspect something was wrong before you arrived here?”

Dark heads shook.

“The right limo was gassed up and idling for us. We hopped in,” Aldo said.

“Like lambs to the slaughter,” Macho Mario growled dolefully.

Imagining him as a lamb was quite the funny-bone tickler. Temple bit her lip and caught Matt’s eye, who gave his answer. “I didn’t know what normal was for these events, so it all seemed uneventful to me.”

“There was one surprise,” Aldo noted.

“What was that?” half-a-dozen basso voices wondered.

“Your cat,” he told Temple, “hitched a ride in my groomsmen-mobile. I didn’t recall anyone inviting Midnight Louie to be a ring bearer.”

“Have you seen him since you all were ushered inside?” She hadn’t yet encountered him in the living fur, which was odd.

“No, ma’am,” Emilio said smartly. “He must have run off and hid at all the strangers and commotion.”

That didn’t sound like Louie, who had a habit of running toward strangers and commotion. Where was the big lug now?

“I saw him upstairs,” Matt put in. “In fact, he led me upstairs.”

Several of the boys laughed lustily. “Hey, there, Matt, maybe he wanted to rush up to where the action was,” Ralph jibed.

“The action was dead,” Matt said.

A pall fell like a winding sheet over the naturally boisterous Fontana spirits.

“Sorry, man,” Ralph said. “We only heard about the body on the bed. We didn’t have to find it.”

The other brothers nodded somberly, but Temple was sure they’d expected to find lots of bodies upstairs at a brothel, live ones. And, frankly, she doubted that dead ones would much upset seasoned wise guys. But she’d never tell Matt that. He’d be shocked.

You could play along with the Fontana boys’ pussycat facades, but you should never forget their Berettas weren’t just a high-tech fashion accessory.

Temple pulled out Nicky’s cell phone and asked him to take the images of the dead woman around to all the tables. There was much tsking and glum murmuring among them, but no Fontana claimed to recognize the girl.

Wonderful! Total strikeout. The victim was utterly unknown by anyone now in the Sapphire Slipper. Not likely. How was Temple going to find a murderer among this cast of dozens? And by tomorrow afternoon, yet?

Start at the point you know, she told herself.

“Okay. This question is for all you younger generation Fontanas. How’s your relationship with your current girlfriend and how long have you been associated?”

There was a stunning silence. Most guys don’t talk relationships even when plied with vodka and needle nose pliers to their private parts. Why were they going to breathe a word in this communal setting?”

“Please, guys. You were the ones deemed worthy of nicking, which set this whole insanity in motion. I don’t have time to take you aside one by one for a private tête-à-tête. The police may be more private about interviewing you, but they’ll be a lot less understanding.”

Macho Mario snorted. “The police aren’t understanding at all. Okay, girlie, you didn’t ask, but I’ll come clean. I’ve been a widower for twelve years. I ain’t never been to the Sapphire Slipper. I can still get my own girlfriends at any bar in Vegas.”

“Have you ever dumped a girlfriend since you were an eligible bachelor again?”

“For one thing, I have never been eligible. I have lawyers who see to that. For another, I know that a guy my age and weight can’t be choosy. I also know my rep attracts the little dolls. I have never been known to say no to a little doll, hence they do not leave me unless a wedding ring comes along from some new beau. Then it’s no hard feelings, aloha.”

Macho Mario’s unabashed confession got the brothers rushing to spill their guts.

“It was Aldo,” Armando said. “Flipping over your aunt. That got our girlfriends all stirred up. Then they try on the bridesmaid gowns and say they hate them, and only a bridal gown will do. Vera Wang, yet.”

Rico shook his head at their oldest brother. “When Nicky tied the knot, we all thought he was just young and didn’t know better. No offense, Van. And, although he was the youngest, he’d always wanted to settle down early, go straight, have a hotel of his own, and kids. Or kid, in your case. How is little Cinnamon, anyway?”

“Safe at home now, and in preschool otherwise,” Van said, “which is more than can be said about any of you, then or now.”

The brothers managed to look both sheepish and suave, en masse.

Van nudged Temple in the side. “Fontanas do ‘guilty but innocent’ so well. I’d like to see your stone-cold police lieutenant, Molina, handling this gang in an interrogation room.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” Temple answered. She addressed the Fontanas again. “All your girlfriends hate their bridesmaid gowns?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Mamma mia, does she!”

“Already offered it as a car rag for the Viper.”

“But Kit and Van put a lot of thought into them,” Temple objected. “The colors are sophisticated, the lines elegant, and there’s no bow on the butt. What more could they want?”

There was a long, sullen silence.

“Bridal gowns,” Temple answered herself.

“This wedding stuff has made them snap,” Eduardo said. “Simple as that.”

“How long have you been going together?” Temple asked absently, still mourning the fact that Van’s and Kit’s brilliant choice of bridesmaid gowns was not only a washout, it had incited a rebellion.

Their answers echoed the women’s. “Six years.” “Three.” “Four.” “Three.” “Five.”

“Uh, guys. That’s a pretty stable amount of time. Didn’t it ever occur to you that they might be expecting some more permanent commitment?”

“They have jobs,” they chorused again.

“Jobs, hell. Careers.”

“Nobody was clamoring for bambinos, and that is sure not gonna happen for Aldo and Kit.”

“They liked a good time, and we had ‘em. Why ruin it?”

As the Fontana boys listed their grievances against their suddenly martially minded significant others, Temple mulled recent polls she’d seen that women were slow to tie the knot nowadays. That they no longer needed men to support them financially, or even to give them babies. They were totally independent. Then why did these eight go over the edge?

This whole scheme was beginning to look like a prank that had gone very wrong when someone used it as cover to kill a young woman nobody here knew. They all said they didn’t, anyway.

Temple turned brisk. She wanted some one-on-one time with Matt. He was the most at risk.

“Okay, guys. Were any of you not in full view of the others at any time after you left the limo out front?”

Another long silence. Fontana boys did not squeal.

Van stepped in. “Only Nicky and Matt. They were able to split off from the main group because they weren’t the objects of the kidnappers’ affections and objections. And the staff here didn’t know a Fontana from a Fontana from a tall, blond stranger. Nobody missed them.”

That meant that she and Temple were the only ones whose significant other was in the murder suspect runoff.

Oh, goodie.

Temple decided that she needed a command post.

Imagine: her acting like Lieutenant Molina. Actually, she was beginning to sympathize with the problems of the police force.

“I need to interview suspects separately someplace private,” Temple told Miss Kitty when she returned to the parlor.

The Sapphire Slipper girls were playing computer games, including solitaire. Weird.

“We got plenty of private rooms upstairs. Take your pick. They’re not going to see any action tonight.”

“The murder room did.”

“Don’t use that one then.”

As if she would!

Temple returned to the bar, went up to Matt, and tapped him on the shoulder, jerking her head to the exit.

Hoots and laughter followed them out into the parlor, then whistles and kiss-kiss sounds hounded them into the foyer.

“I’m glad they’re all having so much fun with that dead girl lying alone upstairs,” Matt said.

“She’s not alone. Emilio’s gone back up there already to guard her door.”

“I guess that’s a girl’s dream death in this town: Fontana brothers at your door.”

“Matt. Chill! I know it’s rough to find someone dead. You tried to revive her. It was too late.”

“I said the prayers anyway. That’s never too late. Good God, Temple, can you imagine what it’s like to be feet away from a murder, and not know it?”

“Like a baptism of fire on the battlefield,” she said seriously. “No, I can’t imagine that. No one here admits to recognizing the girl. That is so . . . unbelievable. Was she brought in just to be killed in this mob scene, so the motive is forever obscured?”

“You’re right. I can only help her now by making sure whoever did this doesn’t walk out of here tomorrow free. We need to get the police out here. There may be evidence in that room, on that body, that would reveal the murderer.”

“There’s surely evidence there that would implicate you. And Nicky. And the press will be all over any lurid headlines involving Fontanas. I’m thinking this death was planned to take advantage of the mock-kidnapping.”

“But the only ones who knew about the abduction in advance were the girlfriends, although the brothel staff knew a big party of men was expected.

“Thank you, Mr. Clarity. At least all those people are strangers to us, not our nearest and dearest, or friends, anyway.”

“So what did all the women tell you?”

“Nothing. Less than an embarrassed Fontana brother. None of them admitted to knowing the dead woman’s face.”

“It’s an easy lie. Simon Peter found it came trippingly to the tongue in the Garden of Gethsemane, three times.”

It took Temple a full minute to switch to childhood New Testament studies to remember the betrayals of Christ that night by Judas, the designated turncoat. And by St. Peter, the best and the brightest disciple. Peter, the rock upon which Jesus would found his church, denied even knowing Christ three times before the morning cock crowed, as Jesus had predicted.

The lesson was that, in moments when stand-up courage is called for, everybody can be weak-kneed. That might be the case here. A houseful of the sex queens of denial. Certainly the hookers denied the tawdry reality of the their life work. The girlfriends denied the charming elusiveness of the Fontana brothers that domesticity might destroy. The brothers denied growing older and up.

What did she and Matt deny?

That a murder was more than something to solve to get him and Nicky out of an awkward position? That Max Kinsella going missing so suddenly just made him an ex-boyfriend better out of the picture, and not another puzzle that would tear at their separate and joint needs and desires.

Oh, shoot!

Max was having a great dream.

He was doing a trapeze act with a girl in a red velvet swing.

They must have been in the circus. The arena was high and surrounded by applauding throngs. He knew it was a dream because he couldn’t hear the roar of the crowd, could only see those wonder-struck, ravening, open mouths oohing and aahing at his daring swings back and forth.

He was perfect, immortal, his hands changing holds, swift and sure. He was dancing on air, hanging by a hair . . . and by a hand from his own lifeline.

The girl in the red velvet swing above him had dainty legs hidden by a froth of Victorian lace beyond the knee. She was winking at him, peeking over her full short velvet skirts, and she had red hair. It was a coppery, strawberry red, and it clashed with her valentine-red velvet swing ropes.

Which suddenly turned into DNA spirals of thick, coagulating blood.

A bronze-scaled snake was swiveling down those gory ropes, toward him, just as he thrust out his hand to catch the swing and spin off into the distance, safe.

The snake undulated toward his grasping, muscled forearm, suddenly naked, the arm, not the snake. The snake’s fangs dripped slowly. Like an IV.

The crowd now surrounded an operating table. Max was laid out on it in a skimpy white hospital gown. No, not an operating table, a morgue dissecting table, and the snake’s yawning fangs were turning saw-toothed to become the coroner’s cranial cutting saw . . .

His still-living limbs flailed, seeking a secure purchase, on the trapeze or the red velvet swing.

He heard metal clattering, felt the pain of being cut open without anesthetic, twisted away from the treacherous arena, tore the girl from her red velvet perch. They fell struggling into the abyss, sawdust and sequins sparkling like a reverse night sky at the bottom of the circus ring. One ring to rule them all. Three rings, including the Worm Orobouros. Opal. Unlucky. Emerald. Fragile.

“Wake up,” said a voice.

Hands shook his shoulders. Someone shook him hard enough that the back of his skull rapped a hard surface.

God!

Are you sleeping, are you sleeping, dormez-vous? Morning bells are ringing. Ton. Ton. Ton. Morning bells are ringing. Frère Jacques. Brother John. Auprès de ma blonde, je dèsire dormir. Auprès de ma blonde . . .

A tiny flashlight beam was drilling into his left eye.

“Wake up, Mike!”

That “Mike” did it. Woke him up to a lie. A fresh lie he recognized. He instantly knew where he was, who he was supposed to be, and that something bad had happened.

“Revienne?” he asked the dark behind the dentist’s drill of light into his brain.

“Mike.” Her voice, with that ambiguous, charming, accented English.

Are you sleeping, brother John?

“Mon Dieu, Mike! He was trying to kill you. Can you get up?”

He sighed. Not easily.

She hadn’t turned on the room’s general lighting.

“An assassin! Mon Dieu. The only explanation. Here, in such sanctuary. If I hadn’t been thinking about you, hadn’t had an insight on your therapy, I’d have never come by so late. Mike. Say something. Speak.”

“Was it an . . . injection?”

“Oui. Ja. Da. Yes! In your veins. We must find the needle. It fell to the floor when you struggled and he ran. We need it for testing.”

We.

Testing here? Not bloody likely. He felt the floor for a dropped hypo and found nothing. Time to move on. He pushed himself up using the strength of his arms, the ones so invincible in the dream. They were pretty stable. Good. His legs?

“The leg casts,” she said as if reading his mind. “Perhaps you can do without. But not here. Not yet.”

Her breaths came fast and frantic in the silent room, betraying the rapid search and reject of her brain cells. “Murder. Here! That is of all places supposed to be safe! Mon Dieu.”

He thought, irrelevantly, that a fervent “sacré bleu” would be a nice alternative.

“Nothing else to do,” she muttered to him, to herself. “We must leave. Gather forces. How do I move you? Mike! Is your brain clear now? Can you do as I say?”

Yes. Yes. Do I want to?

“An assassin has breached this . . . what is the word? . . . citadel of civilization. I can’t believe it yet. Who are you? Why? Who’d want to kill a helpless man?”

Not quite helpless.

“We must get you out of here.”

We again?

“I must . . . must . . . take you out. It’s the middle of the night. You have a seizure. I’m taking you to the laboratory for treatment.”

Laboratory? Ouch.

“No, not an emergency. Everything is fine. Just an . . . adjustment. I am, of course, authorized. Can you get yourself back up on the bed?”

So he was on the floor. Someone had wrestled him there.

She heaved. His arm muscles took hold and helped.

“Good. God. Good. It’s all right if you look drugged. They’re used to serious conditions here. They’re used to me, moving around. I will take you out. Just . . . let me do it. Say nothing. Do nothing. Mike, do you hear me?”

More than you know, sweetheart.

“Mein Gott! They will kill you if they can.”

He didn’t like hearing that, but he didn’t doubt it. Now. So she spoke fluent German as well as French. And what else? For now, her shock and stress rang true. He could let her lever and scam his hampered body out of here. He agreed. They had to leave.

After that, away from the drugs and control—and, unfortunately, his only contact, Garry Randolph—he would be stronger, his mind clearer. He could decide what to do next, and what to do about her.

For now, it only mattered what she could do about him.

The ladies in the front parlor were still playing Game Boys. Apparently, they’d never updated to the latest techie toys.

The odd appropriateness of their choice of amusement hadn’t occurred to them, although it had certainly stunned Temple. She supposed they had a lot of odd hours to while away in their profession.

Miss Kitty was knitting, and Ms. Phyliss Shoofly was torturing the ivories on the upright piano in the bar. She was playing the title song to the musical, Cabaret.

Apparently not just life, but death, was a cabaret, my friend. Because life here clearly went on, with time to be killed as well as paid for.

Temple paused on the threshold, studying the women’s odd combination of undress and gussied up with such fripperies as fingerless chiffon gloves, garter belts and hose, teeny-tiny thongs, high heels, and low-cut mini-corsets.

The various shades of blue reminded Temple of Matt’s “Virgin Mary blue,” the pastel not-quite-turquoise shade found on Catholic holy cards of the Virgin and Tiffany jewelry boxes. That was an odd combo of the sacred and the secular.

Here the blues ran the gamut from a military navy blue speaking of bondage and discipline to ruffles of the palest sky blue, speaking of sugar and spice and everything nice. Yet it all was exaggerated, whether butch or babyish. It all went to extremes, like elaborate theater. Like a cabaret.

“I’m surprised you don’t play solitaire with real cards,” Temple remarked as she came in and sat down on one of the few free chairs.

“Cards?” one woman jeered. “If the guys knew we had cards in the house they’d hole up with them and start gambling. We want their concentration, and their money, on us.”

“Is that why the Sapphire Slipper is so far out on the desert?” Temple asked.

“To keep the men captive?”

“Sure,” answered Miss Kitty, rising and moving among the courtesans. “Pretty and pleasing as my girls are, gambling is a more magnetic vice. It’s hard to lure big spenders away from the tables. That’s why I keep a cigar bar stocked with world-class spirits, and why my cook can whip up big game dishes as well as cow and crawfish. And, of course, my girls are the best in the state at their specialties.”

“Do you often rent the whole house to special parties?”

“Sure. Conventioneers. PACs.”

“Political Action Committees?” Temple couldn’t help sounding shocked.

Miss Kitty’s plump features folded into a complacent smile.

“We put the Action in PACs.”

“So nothing about this booking set off any red flags?”

“Only the green flags of moolah. The girls enjoy a big party. There are group scenes. Some customers request special, high-dollar attention.”

“Would you say you and your staff were disappointed when you discovered this was a kidnapping party?”

“Hell, no. Surprised at first, sure. But then we eyed the ‘victims’ and thought this would be a laugh riot. My girls are ready to do vixens-in-charge any time.”

“And it didn’t bother you that the men were captives?”

“Pretty willing captives, once everything became clear.” Miss Kitty leaned against a floral-upholstered easy chair. “I’m going to set out some sodas and chips in the kitchen. The girls are used to a bedtime snack about now. They burn a lot of energy before the wee hours. As for what goes on here, Miss Barr, we aim to please our customers, and I’ve never known a man to object to some sexy teasing.”

Matt would have, Temple knew, but he wasn’t caught in the same net as the Fontana brothers. As for the brothers, once they recognized their girlfriends, they would have gone along with the mock-kidnapping. They would know that sampling the house goods was only a tease. The whole idea was to claim the brothers, once and for all.

All for once, and once for all. Like the Three Musketeers’ “all for one and one for all.”

It was just a bit of nonsense and fun, until the dead girl had landed in their midst.

Temple punched up the photos on Nicky’s cell phone.

“Look. I’m going to send these pics around again. One of you might recognize the girl in them on a second round. Nobody else has a clue.”

Game Boys idled in laps. Whitened teeth bit into reddened and plumped-up lips. The phone passed from woman to woman, each one expertly clicking through the three photos Nicky had taken, then shrugging and shaking her head. The screen was small and the quality was iffy.

The dead girl was not a game.

Babette handed the phone back to Temple when the circle had been completed. “Can’t say I recognize her. She could be a Fontana girlfriend.”

“They’re all accounted for.”

More shrugs. Game Boys were in play again on several laps.

“Listen,” Temple said, annoyed by the indifference. “Something is fishy here and I want answers. I’ll be a lot easier to deal with than the police. I bet they like to rake hookers over the coals.”

“We are legal,” Angela said.

“We are courtesans, not hookers.”

“We don’t lure men, they come looking for us. We are a cut above.”

“Then if you’re a cut above, why can’t you spell?” Temple asked, cuttingly.

“Huh? Who says we can’t?”

“Well, you don’t know your alphabet.”

“ABCs? We know a lot more than that.”

“Then why are E and M missing from your roster?”

“E is a sucky letter for glamorous names. I mean, Emily, Eleanor, Evelyn, Edith. Sound like freaking dead schoolteachers. That’s not the kind of school we teach.”

“And M?” Temple pointed out. “Surely M is promising. Mitzi, Muffin, Mimi . . . I guess you may be a cut above but you’re not very creative thinkers. Might that carry through into the bedroom?”

She had them riled and spitting. Playing Bad Cop was fun. No wonder Molina did it. They protested in a blizzard of comments.

“Hey, that’s not fair!”

“You don’t know nothin’ about us.”

“That M is taken. Reserved. We can’t use it.”

Finally. An interesting response.

“Why?” Temple shot back.

The sudden silence said a lot. Kohled eyes consulted kohled eyes. A communal sigh and continued, now sullen, silence.

“What name is the M for?” Temple goaded. “What’s the matter? Can’t you spell it?”

“It is an odd spelling,” Inez said quietly. “But then, she’s an odd girl.”

“Miss Fritzi Ritzi House Favorite, you mean,” Lili said.

“She has a shtick,” Zazu added.

“What is the name?” Temple asked again.

“Madonnah. M-a-d-o double n-a-h.” Zazu again. She didn’t seem to have issues with the missing girl.

It took Temple a second to visualize the spelling. “Like the rock star, only different.”

“She has a Madonna shtick,” Niki said. “Always changing her hair color and style, her nails, her makeup. Even her own mother couldn’t keep up with recognizing her.”

“Her shtick is being a prima donna,” Lili said. “She doesn’t have to sit in a presentation row like the rest of us, selling her wares. She picks her johns from watching on the surveillance camera. We hardly see her.”

“Then,” Temple said, picking up the cell phone, “these photos could be of her. Care to look again?”

“We haven’t heard she’s here again,” Kiki objected.

“She sounds like someone who could have slipped in anytime,” Temple pointed out.

They shrugged and passed around the cell phone images again.

“Can’t say. Could be her. Even we didn’t glimpse all of her looks. We just know she’s in the house when there are these secret assignations in the Starlet room.”

“She’s Miss Kitty’s pet.”

“Like Baby Blue, the cat?” Temple asked.

“Like, I don’t know,” Crystal said. “Like some weird recluse. Maybe she has a special talent in the sack. We don’t know. She comes and she goes, and we hardly know when or where. If we run into her in the break room or the hall or the bathroom, she’s like a freaky geek. No chitchat, no zippers help pulled up and down. Just in and out. She does her job that way, she’d get no johns. But they love the shtick and keep asking for her.”

“Madonnah,” Temple repeated.

Deedee handed the cell phone back to Temple as it finished its rounds. “Could be her. Who knows?”

Miss Kitty might, Temple thought.

“Thanks,” she told them. “Sorry I was so rough on you. I need the info.”

They stared at her. “Honey,” said Zazu, “you is a declawed kitten.”

Temple was not encouraged, but she was wondering how Matt would take knowing he’d given CPR to a hooker called Madonnah.

Matt snagged Temple as she was passing through the bar to the kitchen for something bracing for further interviews, like a Red Bull energy drink. It was no surprise that she’d spotted a large stock of those in the refrigerator.

“Does the busy interrogator have a minute?” he asked, stopping her by the doorway where the opportunities for overhearing were minimum.

“Oh, Matt. It’s so impossible. Meeting every Fontana girlfriend and trying to remember who goes out with whom and unravel how they came up with this scheme and who might have had an ulterior motive.”

“And you haven’t even factored in the resident ‘courtesans’ yet.”

She groaned. “Whoever set up this murder, if it was indeed set up, knew how to confuse the issue three times over. I finally beat a lead on the identity of the victim out of the resident courtesans.”

“That’s great! Why are you moaning about not making progress then?”

“She was a real mystery woman, made a shtick out of always being in disguise.”

“I thought those abundant Venus on a clamshell locks were a little unreal.”

“She worked under the name Madonnah, spelled with an h on the end and was almost never seen. She picked her johns, not the other way around. The others were not too taken with her prima donna ways. So . . . one of them could have killed her in a fit of jealousy.”

“That’s why I think you should let me interview the courtesans.”

“You?”

“I am a professional counselor. The theory being that many sex industry workers have abuse issues, I might pry things out of them easier than you. A lot of women like this call into ‘The Midnight Hour.’ “

“It’s true that they probably think women like me are hopelessly naive about the world as they see and live it.” Temple glanced back toward the parlor, where bare parts of half-clad courtesans were visible through the archway. “These pros would eat a good boy like you alive.”

“Maybe not. I know how to get past well-varnished facades. And I’m not as good as I used to be.”

Temple lofted an eyebrow. “In the behavior sense, not the bedavior sense.”

“See? I’m more qualified than ever for the job. Let me try.”

She considered his request, realizing that he still regretted the call girl’s death at the Goliath. Apparently, their tête-à-tête that night had been a revelation to both. Matt’s priestly years of celibacy made him a mystery to worldly women like hookers, Temple bet. They’d probably sense that he didn’t have the ordinary male vulnerability to their wiles and seductions and mind games. He was firmly neutral in that department, almost like a gay friend. Yet not gay at all.

“They’ll be enchanted with you, and probably let their hair and their guards down,” Temple decided. “Pick a room upstairs to set up in, and go to it.”

“Not upstairs, not their working environment. If they have private quarters, there must be a gathering room there.”

So it was that half an hour later the first courtesan, glancing significantly at her sisters in suspicion, announced that she was having a visit with “Mr. McDreamy Midnight” in the break room and slunk off through the Fontana boys’ bar—applause and whistles—through the girlfriends’ kitchen—hoots and the clatter of tableware—to the low rambling annex where the women of the Sapphire Slipper actually bathed and slept and did their nails.

Temple hoped that she was doing the right thing. Which was hard to determine in a brothel.

Darned if the brothel “break room” didn’t resemble any small business cafeteria, if it was for a funky, loosely run operation.

Matt took in the Formica-topped vintage dinette sets scattered over the vinyl tile floor. Their chrome legs and trim were age-dulled, but their cheerful seat covers in maroon, purple, yellow, and red plastic resembled a field of large, gaudy mushrooms.

A big white refrigerator was the elephant in the room, dwarfing a roomy microwave on an adjacent wheeled cart. A similar cart hosted a small TV. If small Lucite trays holding fingernail files, polish, and glue, lip gloss and mascara wands weren’t lying on the tables, Matt would have felt as at home as in a convent kitchen.

But the Age of Innocence was past, and this kind of communal living had nothing churchly about it.

Matt’s impression of the resident courtesans had been that they all looked alike. This open call interview session Temple had dreamed up for him would force him to discover differences and, perhaps, suspects.

It was likely one of their own, after all, who lay murdered upstairs. He shivered, more because Miss Kitty had kicked up the air-conditioning when it was obvious they’d be stuck out here with the body for a few hours. But that was like trying to stop the Red Sea from parting with an air machine.

“Howdy, Mr. Midnight. My name is Angela. We’re coming in alphabetically, so you get the heavenly body first.”

Angela paused in the doorway in typical temptress pose, one arm up along the frame, the other hand on her hip. At least she wore something, a sheer peignoir over a corset with garter straps and thong panties. Matt would never get what was hot about such outfits. Must be hangovers from Victorian repression. Analyzing that kept him from ogling Angela’s celestial form, which did look slim and firm and shiny in a Barbie doll sort of way he found a little too perfect.

“You know me?” Matt asked as she swaggered over on her four-inch spikes, jerked open the refrigerator door and regarded the contents long enough to give him a good rear view.

She finally found a can of some new-wave high-energy drink and joined him in sitting at the gray Formica-topped table.

“I never thought you’d be a customer out here at the Sapphire Slipper,” Angela said.

“I’m not. I was hijacked. We town guys all were.”

“I looove your voice on the radio. It’d be a real kick to hear it whispering in my ear some night. Tables turned.”

He ignored her come-on. “So you’ve actually heard my program?”

“We all have, honey, coming down from a night’s work in here. Unwinding. Gettin’ down. Who do you think we tune in to? Mr. Mellow Midnight.”

He knew he had long-haul truckers and night casino staff in his invisible audience, but he’d never dreamed whole brothels of shady ladies would tune in. “You close at midnight, then?” he asked, surprised.

“That’s our hours, noon to midnight. It’s a long drive back to anywhere from here, and even good-time guys and hookers gotta sleep sometimes.”

He eyed the hall off the kitchen. “Those are your quarters?”

“Yup. You wanta see?”

Matt thought it might be illuminating. “Yeah. Do all the . . . places have this arrangement? The guest bedrooms up front and fancy, and a, like, dorm for the residents in back?”

She stood and leaned over him, as her lips enunciated the words only inches from his. “No, my Midnight Man. Some of the lower-end places have the girls work out of their living quarters. In a way, it’s more convenient.”

But this was more convenient for a murderer, to kill on what amounted to a stage set, far from where the residents actually slept.

Matt stood. “My curiosity is purely academic.”

“Yeah, sure.” She smiled enticingly over her filmy blue shoulder as she led him down the dim, plain hall. She reminded him of the huge plaster figure atop the Blue Mermaid Motel, a knowing creature in her element, relishing that he was out of his.

It took five minutes to figure out the courtesan’s quarters were as bare and practical as a convent. How unnerving that women consecrated to no sex and women living on nothing but sex ending up in such spare, unsensual circumstances.

He saw single beds without head or footboards, cheap motel dressers bought by multiples with matching bedside tables. Blinds on windows. Everything institutional, although stuffed animals lined up against the plain beige walls and the dresser tops here were littered with gaudy rhinestones and garters, not the simple string of rosary beads and a small photo of the old folks at home. There were no photos of anyone but these women, taken at formally happy moments, in a line in the parlor, laughing in the break room. They were family.

Nuns, of course, were an old and dying breed. These women were a breed as old as prehistory probably, and not dying out at all.

“Knowing the layout of the place will help put the murder in perspective,” Matt commented as they returned to the main room.

“ ‘The place.’ You can’t even call it a chicken ranch. A brothel. A bordello. A whorehouse. You give all that advice out night after night to sad and lonely people, but you never give us spirit-lifters out here on the desert a moment of thought or credit. Send some of those road-weary truckers thinking too hard on their lonely lives our way, Mr. Midnight. That’d be some real good counsel.”

“If you’d give them the same personal attention you’re giving me right now, I can see your point.”

“You can see a lot more than that, but you’re not looking. Engaged, I hear, like tall, dark, and Aldo. That doesn’t stop guys from coming out here.”

“How’d you get that information?”

“Those ditsy girlfriends. They chatter up a storm. Not used to being rounded up in a group and kept isolated out here in the desert.”

“The resident girls aren’t chat-happy?”

“This is our workplace, hon. It’s hard work catering to men who expect a hundred percent every minute for their money. We get worn-out. No time for pajama party gossip. We are the pajama party.”

“Do you have any . . . protection?”

“You speaking sexually? We are all condoms all the time. Every place, every act.”

“Um, no. I meant a . . . union.”

“Not here. We do have an ‘association’ and bylaws. We’re freelance workers like your girlfriend. We accept jobs, see them through, get paid, kick back a commission to our landlord for room and board and providing the necessities, and move on in a few weeks to another place, another part of the country.”

“You like that?”

“Which parts?”

“The rootlessness.”

“You bet. Not everybody can travel for their job and get paid for it. There are a lot of laughs going on all over this country. We work the hot spots. East Coast, West Coast, and Vegas. Atlantic City, the Gulf Coast some. Gambling brings out high rollers or would-be high rollers. Both winning and losing brings ‘em home to the Sapphire Slipper.”

“What brought Madonnah back to the Sapphire Slipper?”

Angela forgot her seductress act to think before she spoke. Sincerely. “I don’t know. Our schedules are our own. That’s one of the best parts of the job. Thinking about it, that probably is her upstairs. Like her to slip in unnoticed, but she sure didn’t leave that way this time. I don’t know why she came back before she was expected. Maybe because she liked doing the unexpected. She was—”

“What?”

“A loner. Kept to herself. We don’t have to bond like Lassie and Timmy here, but sisterhood helps. She kept aloof.”

“Stuck-up?”

Angela shook her head. “Not that. Just deep inside her own troubles maybe. Like she was just visiting. Always. Just visiting. Tuned out, that’s exactly what she was doing. Only it was the planet, not just our little ole whorehouse.”

Matt digested Angela’s analysis. These women saw a lot of men, and women, at their worst. He trusted Angela’s instincts. That’s what hookers and midnight radio shrinks relied on. Their instincts about strangers in the night.

“Thanks,” he said.

“Next!” she announced as she flounced through the doorway.

“And you are—?” he asked the busty brunette who paused in the doorway to show off her saloon girl figure.

“Babette, Daddy.”

He hated that “Daddy” thing. “I’m Matt.”

“We know who you are. We’re your regular listeners. It’s a thrill to have you on our turf, to see you in person, and isn’t that a nice sight? Are we what you like?”

“I like women,” Matt said. “All ages and stages.”

“Yeah?” Babette was nearing forty as far as Matt could tell. The maternal sort, with all that natural or assisted mammary development. There was a courtesan here for every druther. Even it was mother. Babette heaved her boobs atop the table and crossed her arms in front of them. “What can I do for you, baby?”

Ten minutes later he was ushering Babette out to bring in Crystal.

“Why the alphabetical names?” he asked the thirtyish woman. She was lean with a narrow harsh face and wore a lot of Goth gear he tried to ignore. He was sure her looks determined her shtick.

“We use different names in different places. Vegas attracts a lot of johns. The alphabet helps keep them grounded to who’s who and who does what.”

“And the dead woman . . . ?”

“Madonnah? Guess she turned out to be a kind of Jonah, didn’t she?”

He was surprised to hear this Wicked Queen woman make a biblical reference.

“Oh, I was raised on the Holy Book,” she said, her dark eyes glittering like the iridescent spiky black tattoos on her upper arms. “Whomping my bare bottom with it until I bled.”

“Did you know Madonnah’s real name?” he said, unwilling to go there.

“She said Mary Jo once, but I’ve heard Miss Kitty call her Nonah once too. I don’t know which is the real one, but we take names close to our own. Like Jazz was Jasmine.”

“And you, Crystal?”

“Crystal is beautiful, fine glass and it cuts.”

He noticed the scars on her forearms. Self-cutting. She noticed him noticing and sneered. “Cathy. What a wimp that little bitch was.”

“Crystal shatters,” he reminded her. “But you are far from being a wimp.”

“I’m not a fan,” she said. “You don’t live in a real world.”

“Agreed. Not that real a world. So you thought Madonnah was a wimp too.”

“Did I say so?”

“Yeah. Loud and clear.”

“You think you hear things, over the airwaves. You think you see things.” She glanced at her scarred and tattooed arms. “I could show you some things, if you had the guts to come up to my room.”

He didn’t, and he knew it. “No one can go there but you, until you’re ready to come out.”

“Scared?” Jeering again.

“Damn right. You win. At last.”

She drew back, not liking the ease of her victory. “I have nothing to tell you.”

“Not anymore. Thanks for the insight on Madonnah. It might help.”

She stood, glowering. “I don’t want help.”

“No, but I thought you might want to help. A little.”

“She was okay. I guess.”

Crystal turned in a crackle of black taffeta skirts and left.

Matt wiped the invisible veil of sweat off his upper lip before . . . Deedee came in.

Temple would pay for setting these brassy, sassy, glassy women on him, but not in the way Crystal would want.

Matt took notes, but Deedee, Fifi, and Gigi were as featherweight as their names, which really were: Dolores, Frances, and Geraldine. Too many girls were still named after their grandmothers. They had seen Madonnah around for three years. She kept to herself, was a little nervous. Seemed like she wasn’t really cut out for the Life. Didn’t have much fun, but delivered for the johns.

Matt turned over a page in his Hello Kitty notebook, courtesy of Miss Kitty.

These big-eyed kitty drawings reminded him of the slitty-eyed real cats prowling the Sapphire Slipper. He’d never admit it to Temple, but he found Midnight Louie’s presence . . . encouraging. That old tomcat always knew where the rats were hidden. Matt thought he’d glimpsed the old boy hanging around that sleek Sapphire Slipper house cat, Baby Blue. He hoped Louie would not let blatant sex appeal divert him from his forever mission of protecting Temple.

Then there was the matter of the Bed between them. Matt knew Louie was used to taking his leisure on Temple’s California king mattress. Matt wasn’t about to share her horizontal time with a cat, especially not after they were married. He supposed he and Louie would just have to duke that out between them. Matt was a reasonable man, but he knew who would win that contest. Black topped blond except in Temple’s human love life.

“I’m Heather,” breathed a Marilyn Monroe-Jackie Kennedy voice from the doorway.

She was a provocative blend of the two. Matt was reminded of a photo of MM he’d seen, wearing a dark Jackie K wig (way before she’d become Jackie O, which made her Jackie K-O in some weird way), and pearls and palazzo pants and a soft flowing blouse.

The odd thing was that Marilyn had never looked more relaxed than in that prism high-fashion outfit. Otherwise she was molded, pinched, corseted, and confined until overflowing like these SS women.

Matt found himself confounded by this eternal cultural icon of madonna-whore. The really weird part was both celebrated women had been deemed to play both those roles in their tumultuous private lives.

“Heather,” he said, playing for time. “On the hill?”

“Not Scottish. Maybe Heather as in ‘heathen.’”

“Another fan, I guess. You know my history. You have the advantage.”

“That’s nice.” She slithered around him, touching his shoulder with a false fingernail, before she sat. “I like the advantages.”

“What about Madonnah?”

“Her? Didn’t belong here. Didn’t want to play the game. Games. She didn’t even listen to your show.”

“No!” Matt feigned horror. “I thought I was the house DJ after-hours.”

“Not just you.” Heather pushed herself up to grab a bunch of chilled grapes from the refrigerator.

Matt thought: Roman orgy. Was he programmable! Putty in their practiced hands.

“We loved your clients, is that what you’d call them?” Heather had a lovely English accent. Maybe her real name was . . . Helena. He could be bewitched if he didn’t know better. “Charming people. You are always so considerate of them. Reminds us of our own jobs. Consideration. Quite a lost art, don’t you think?”

He nodded.

“It won’t help you solve bloody murder, of course. The people who do that are always inconsiderate. Look at Sherlock Holmes. Snooty sort! Hercule Poirot! Another airy-fairy! But not you.”

Heather, with her hooked nose, too close-set eyes, and rugged complexion had managed to seat herself on his lap to fondle his shirt buttons.

He laughed. “Of all the seducers at the Sapphire Slipper, you’re the one having the most fun. What about Madonnah?”

Heather gazed past his shoulder, imperiously. “No. No, Madonnah. No fun fast, as the Americans say. A very sober girl. Scared sober, I should say. Not like you, Bertie Wooster Baby. You’d like to be scared out-of-your mind drunk.”

“Not now. Not here. Thanks very much. Mind the gap,” he added in the robotic tone of a London Underground recorded message as he stood to unlap her and show her out the archway.

She growled and snapped at him, but went.

Mind the gap! Matt couldn’t believe he was ably parading prostitutes in and out of his lunchroom office like an Inspector of the Yard. Temple had a lot to answer for.

Inez was a Latina beauty with a tender manner. He could see her reared as a good girl, wearing a white mantilla and clutching a white First Communion prayer book and rosary at Mass . . . until some junior high gang-banger deflowered her in a back car seat and it was all over, the days of white and roses. Her culture was black and white, bad and good, and she was suddenly done wrong and irremediably bad.

So she went the way she’d been pushed.

She was a lovely girl, and his heart ached for her, but she wasn’t used to observing and making judgments, just living in her narrow aisle of deserved (she thought) purgatory.

He sent some Hail Marys after her, but doubted they’d catch up to her scurrying spike-heeled steps.

It was starting to weigh on him, like too many confessions heard in a row, the lives lived and not lived here. The ghosts of gaiety and ghastliness that make up the all-too-human condition.

What was he learning?

That the courtesans were gypsies, birds of passage who often bunked together but made no lasting ties. Not with the johns and not with one another. They shared the intimacy of sisters and lovers everywhere they went, but went everywhere alone.

That didn’t seem likely to lead to murder. Yet, maybe where sex was so casual, death would be too. Matt couldn’t fathom these women. He’d picked up that they liked their tawdry notoriety. They burbled about Web pages and blogs and steady customers always welcoming them back wherever they went. About MySpace.com and You Tube.

He found the lifestyle all too depressing. Sure, some of the women showed obvious signs of the childhood abuse that leads to sexual acting out. But some really seemed more like entrepreneurs, peddling their flesh with gusto and even glee of a sort.

Still, they were hooked on the midnight sob stories he heard on WCOO-AM radio.

Still, there was always one more rich john who would drape them in goodies, or a lonely one who’d leave consoled, or a reluctant one, like Matt, who needed to be cajoled. It was unnerving to think that he could have sex with every one of these women, or even several at once, all for what was a reasonable price for his income level.

But he’d been reared a Roman Catholic, not a Roman emperor, and orgies were not for him. Nor celibacy, anymore. Thank God.

And still Jazz and Kiki and Lili and Niki and that ole devil Zazu to go. It already felt like a long night, and no one was having any fun yet.

Garry Randolph had two roles to play that awful morning.

One was genuine. Heartfelt.

His charge was gone, had vanished. Overnight. His “nephew, Mike Randolph.”

This grief he didn’t have to feign. Max was . . . was . . . is . . . so much to him. Pupil. Peer. Partner.

The clinic bedroom reeked with treachery. An overturned IV stand. Far under the bed, a full hypodermic needle. It rested in Garry’s capacious suit coat pocket now. Not for him, or his physical type, the sleek fitted suit. For him the large, lumpy one, capable of holding as many magicians’ tricks as a suit coat the size of the Colosseum in Rome . . . .

“But what happened here?” he asked the supervising doctor, acting as ignorant as he felt for once.

“These head cases can get strange obsessions. The man, who knows what he was thinking, simply ran. Fled who knows what demons in his stressed brain?”

The man, thought Randolph, ran because his life was threatened. Garry had no doubt the syringe would prove to be filled with something fatal.

Max! Out of his head but still possessed of that rare, acute prescience Garry had seen in him as a terrorism-wounded boy of seventeen. A middle-class American boy catapulted into the worst the world had to offer, the worst of global politics a man or boy could face.

Garry had faced it too long. He yearned for a happy ending. The restoration of memory. The restoration of peace. Hope. Happiness.

Now, here, he was called upon to exert all his old, devious skills.

“Perhaps,” he suggested to the night physician, “we should talk to his psychiatrist about this.”

When Temple told Aldo she’d like to interview him alone in the Victorian boudoir, Kit raised an eyebrow.

Heck, the eyebrow almost jousted with her hairline.

“I’m looking for some context here,” Temple told the room, including a scowling Macho Mario and a thoughtful Matt. “Only the eldest will do. Of the brothers, that is,” she said quickly to shut Uncle Mario’s already open and about to object mouth.

Aldo rose, shot his jacket sleeves over his pristine white cuffs, paused to whisper in Kit’s ear at the parlor archway, then glanced into the kitchen.

“I may need a bodyguard to pass through that gauntlet of pissed-off girlfriends.”

The joke lessened the tension behind . . . and the dawning tension ahead as the girlfriends’ chatter became dead silence. They all broadcast an air of heightened interest as a Fontana brother crossed their sight line.

In the foyer, Aldo took a deep breath. “Everybody is twitchier than a Valentine’s Day Massacre trigger finger. Uncle Mario does all the talking for the family when things get tight.”

“It’s just me,” Temple said.

“Right now, ‘just you’ is our designated savior. Don’t fool yourself. The cops will be furious we kept quiet about the crime scene so you could play detective. We’re all in deep scaloppini.”

“But what a way to go,” Temple said as he followed her upstairs, kissing her fingers to the air like a chef. “Pasta, olive oil, and lots of sauce.”

“We may find all those ingredients in the Victorian Room upstairs.” While Temple tried not to blush—racking her brains for any uses of pasta in kinky sex—although the olive oil and sauce she got, Aldo went on. “Why the Victorian Room?”

“I figured it wouldn’t be wired. None of them are supposed to be, but you never know. Recording would ruin the illusion. But I’m counting on you to check it out first.”

“Right. Wait here.”

Aldo slipping into the room’s saccharine pale blue décor resembled a white-clad black panther invading a froufrou shop. It took more than ten minutes, but he examined everything from four-poster canopy to carpet to furniture to walls and ceiling.

He stepped out into the hall to report.

“All is as ersatz, authentic Victorian as could be desired. No wires, no peepholes. So.” He folded his arms and eyed her with an arched eyebrow. “What did you really have in mind here?”

Temple grabbed his arm, ducked inside, and shut the door on them.

Aldo did not look worried. Nor did he look hopeful.

He didn’t have to. She would never even flirt with her aunt Kit’s guy.

“You’re right,” she said. “The police will tear this charade to pieces, making all of us look guilty and no doubt dragging every one of our names through the media. After my first round of interviews it’s becoming evident that, while there are a ton of suspects on the premises, there’s also plenty of room for outside skullduggery.”

“Outside as how? Sapphire Slipper employees?”

“First and foremost, yes. The place had to be reserved; that was a forewarning. The girlfriends think they were clever and that their designated caller sounded like an executive secretary making arrangements for a bunch of businessmen on a company-paid rampage, but it might well have sounded suspicious to the staff here. Then there’s the question of how these babes in the woods managed to subvert your regular Gangsters’ driver and take over.”

“That is odd.” Aldo pulled out his cell phone. Although it was as loath to connect up here as anybody’s, he could still examine his call lists and other information. “Ah. A new hiree was on last night. Marlon Gherken.”

“Could he have been planted?”

“Sure. The Gangsters’ manager runs the daily operation, not us. She’ll be the first person I talk to when we get back to Vegas.”

“She’ll?”

“Gangsters is an equal-opportunity employer,” Aldo said piously.

“Could she be a pal of one of these girlfriends?”

“All my brothers’ girls live and work in Vegas, some in the entertainment industry. That means they know a lot of the workforce here, casually or closely. Yeah. She could be related somehow. But why such an elaborate setup for one murder? I’d have to say that it was something on this end, the bordello, that made this murder happen here and now.”

Temple heaved a sigh and sat on the edge of the frilly feather bed. She fell backward into the linens like Alice in Wonderland into a flower soufflé. After Aldo hauled her upright again, she spit out an errant down feather.

“That’s what this scenario is,” she said, “feathers in the wind. We’re drowning in a miasma of details, and a pile of personalities, half of them strangers, and I can’t pin any one of them down.”

“Sit on this toy rocking horse here, you won’t sink into that.”

Temple followed Aldo’s advice, after removing a small black leather riding crop from the saddle. “Ick! I can’t stand cruelty to rocking horses. Aldo, I was crazy to think I could come out here to get Matt and Nicky off the hook. This case is going to rest on forensic evidence, and we just have to hope that killer left some.”

“Besides Matt and Nicky doing such a good job of that? CPR in a whorehouse. Way to go.”

“Aldo! The murder weapon was an article of clothing as common as cinnamon buns in a bakery to this scene. A fishnet stocking. Please!”

“That’s a little too pat,” he said. “You know it screams kinky sex crime.”

“You don’t think this was a sex crime, half-naked woman and all?”

“They’re all half-naked here. The guy clients too. Nah. I don’t like it. Why, I can’t say. That’s your job, Toots.”

“ ‘Toot, Toot, Tootsie, Good-bye,’ “ Temple quoted the title of the ragtime song. “Go back to the guys’ barroom and ask your brothers about the hiring of this Marlon Gherken. Who, when, and why. And have Electra send up the girlfriend who cops to setting up this event with the Sapphire Slipper and Gangsters. All I can do is follow the trail of the arrangements that made this Murder in Shades of Blue possible.”

He stood, shooting his sleeves again. No wonder the Fontana brothers’ clothing always looked smooth and sharp. They shook their coats like Big Cats shrugging off a nap. Temple admired the effect, but thought that being married to such an unselfconsciously self-conscious man would be tiring. Matt looked better ruffled, especially if she did it.

She sat back on the hard settee, curious to discover which insecure little witch would appear.

It was the endlessly upbeat Meredith Bell, lifestyle coach.

“Aren’t these rooms a hoot?” she asked on entering. “I mean, talk about cheesy fantasies.”

“Is that why you booked the place?”

“No. I booked the place because most of the legalized brothels are farther north, upstate. Lots of freelance ladies work Vegas, which has zillions of available hotel rooms for hanky-panky right on the Strip. Nobody needs to drive to a double-wide in the boonies to get his pathetic rocks off.”

“Apparently you thought the Fontana brothers did.”

“Did not! That was the fun part, taking the Romeos of Las Vegas Boulevard someplace tacky. It might remind them of what they were treating us like: modern conveniences, but not worth committing to. Guys today! With the sexual revolution, they have it all: women who love them and let them walk all over them.”

“Girls today seem to want their freedom too.”

“ ‘Seem to.’ Most women don’t do casual sex well, no matter what face they put on it. Who wants a come-and-go alley cat that can pick up all sorts of diseases, not to mention never show up again some day, when you can have a responsible resident house cat.”

Temple wasn’t going to delve into that one, with this woman or with Midnight Louie. “So why were you elected to call the brothel?”

“I deal with all sorts of people in my job. I’m good on phones, or in person. I’m . . . just convincing, I guess.”

Horrifyingly so, Temple thought. Why is it that people who guided other people were always so infuriatingly self-certain? Except for Matt, which was what made him the brilliant counselor he was. His own uncertainties showed through.

“How did the scam go?” Temple asked, settling into her uncomfortable corner of the settee.

Meredith, a woman who looked like she did daily yoga routines, didn’t even notice the harsh seating.

“Perfectly,” she said. “None of us know more about brothels than we could find on the Web, but I knew this place encouraged large parties and accepted exclusive reservations.”

“When did you make the reservation?”

“Ten days ago. I had to be sure to get the whole place to ourselves. Luckily a lot of their business is impromptu and Monday is a dead day and night. I just put on my executive assistant voice, gave ‘em the credit card number, and we were set. The Sapphire Slipper, and the Fontana brothers, were all ours for twenty-four delicious hours.”

“Whose credit card?”

Meredith straightened her spine and shook her silky blond ponytail. “Alexia had Eduardo’s. We thought the punishment should not only fit the crime, but underwrite it.”

“And what had Eduardo done to incur a three-thousand-dollar tab?”

“Let her see his credit card number when buying her some low-end sop to her self-respect.”

“Hmm,” said Temple, wanting to kick the smug Miss Bell in the supple shins. This juvenile scheme had put Matt in harm’s way. “What was this ‘low-end sop’?”

“A gold charm bracelet with all their little sweet nothings on it. A piano for the piano bar where they met, a fox for being ‘such a foxy lady,’ an Eiffel Tower for their first dinner together at the Paris, a gondola for the Venice, a peacock for the Crystal Phoenix rendezvous . . . I mean, a peacock, for God’s sake! Couldn’t he at least have found a real phoenix?”

Since the phoenix was a mythical beast, Temple thought a peacock made a good substitute. She also thought this particular peahen was a piss-poor substitute for a real girl.

“Actually,” Temple said, “most men I’ve seen wouldn’t spend that much time or thought or money on memorializing sweet nothings.”

“Aldo managed to come up with the real deal: a high-carat engagement ring. And for some strange woman out of left field.”

“That is my maternal aunt you’re talking about, and although she is a woman she is not strange, nor out of left field.”

“You know what I mean.”

Temple sighed. “Yes, I do. All you girls got poison-green jealous and decided to use the innocent excuse of Aldo’s engagement and forthcoming marriage to pursue your own grievances. Aldo’s significant other died. He was not only a free man, he was an unhappy one. Now he’s happy . . . or was, until you and your crew had to turn a genuinely joyous outing into a petty revenge weekend. And I guess you’re happy now that you messed up my fiance’s life and reputation. What’s an innocent bystander sacrificed here and there?”

“You can afford to get on your high horse. You’re engaged.”

“Fair and square,” Temple said. “No coercion, no kidnapping, no nuttiness involved. No setting anyone up for a murder rap.”

“We didn’t know what would happen! We had no idea someone would die. We were going to give the boys the naughty night of their lives. We were just kidding. Obviously.”

“Obviously, someone found your juvenile idea of ‘kidding’ via kidnapping the perfect backdrop for murder.”

Meredith’s relentlessly upbeat expression collapsed like a tissue-thin tent.

“You have to understand,” she said, upset. “In Nevada, brothels are these sort of slightly sleazy near-neighbors. All the girls were dying to see inside one without having to actually put out. Heidi Fleiss is even starting a Stud Farm for women up near Pahrump. Regular women are finally getting to do all the edgy stuff guys have done all the time. Going to a chicken ranch is supposed to be a harmless, fun thing. That’s what we thought we were getting into.”

“Sex for sale?” Temple asked. “It never occurred to any of you that there could be something seamy about it, even in a health-approved setting? Sex is about power. And where there’s power, there’s abuse, even if it’s subtle and concealed by a lot of flash and cash. Whether on the Strip or way out here in the desert. Isn’t that what you women really wanted, the power to protest? To have the men under your power, even in jest and even for twenty-four hours? Surely a ‘lifestyle coach’ should know that.”

Meredith had no answer. She shrugged. “It seemed like harmless fun, like a coed pajama party.”

“With pros.”

“The guys were going along with us.”

“Until someone died.”

“She wasn’t even one of us.”

“Her ‘lifestyle’ wasn’t worth worrying about.”

“No, but . . . she was just the hired help. I mean, we didn’t need her life messing up ours.”

“Well, get ready for a surprise. Her death is going to mess it up a whole lot more than you can imagine.”

Temple’s head was throbbing.

No wonder the golden age of mystery had been in the Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Ellery Queen era of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, the days of cozy, closed-cast murder scenes. Everyone present a suspect. Victims and suspects isolated, so no messy outsider could be pegged as the evildoer at the last moment. A culture clash between the girlfriends and the victim that could have turned lethal. Upstanding citizens could snap when confronted with extreme lifestyles, which is why Matt was such a tailor-made suspect. Upright, uptight clergymen were long fabled as spectacularly snap-worthy. And Fontana brothers were always prime suspect material.

The more desperate Temple was to relieve Matt and Nicky of suspicion, the more frantic she was to wrap this up before it tainted Kit and Aldo’s wedding, the less of a way out she saw.

Nobody here except the Sapphire Slipper residents had any overt connection to the brothel, unless Uncle Mario and brothers were all lying like Milano wool-silk rugs.

One of the girlfriends, of course, might have a slightly shady lady background. She might have a sister in the biz. Who knows? Trouble was, Temple was supposed to find these things out.

She decided she was right to start at absolute zero, since that was all she had anyway. She was doing what those brilliant amateur detectives of almost a hundred years ago had done: observe and trace the time line of the crime.

It had started with the real bachelor party, so she should start with a bachelor and work her way through logically, from person to person.

So which Fontana brother had set up the party? Not Aldo, but someone had to be the front man. She asked Aldo to find the culprit and bring him to the Victorian Room for an interview.

She waited alone in the room’s tawdry elegance. Despite its reputation as an elegant brothel, the Sapphire Slipper was more pretension than class. Temple had used the brothel’s office laptop to survey the competition’s Web sites. (Also to snoop at how it presented itself and use any inside information she could come across.)

Reception was fine, and their cell phones were now registering signals. They had agreed, though, that further isolation would help all involved with the police when they were finally called.

Most legal Nevada brothels were located in the cactus and sagebrush of the boonies, no more than single-wide trailers offering visions of low-end furniture glory.

Compared to that, the Sapphire Slipper was an oasis of sophistication. The “courtesans”—that was the official title for the girls according to their organization site—were freelance workers who set their own prices and menu of offerings. They were rigorously certified as disease-free, and always used condoms. They didn’t languish for months or years at a particular “venue,” but traveled the country like carnies, checking into familiar stands for two to four weeks at a time.

Apparently variety was a big advantage of the brothel menu.

Temple tried not to be judgmental. She understood the argument that legalized prostitution protected both client and provider way more than streetwalking, but she couldn’t picture a life of such casual sexuality. Then she considered the angst she felt in changing lovers, from Max to Matt, with marriage always a likelihood in the equation. . . . And thought maybe that feeling less and experiencing more was not a totally insane way to go.

A gentle knock on the door startled her from her musings.

For a moment she felt like a resident expecting a client. Who would he be? Which one of the men from downstairs? That darling blond guy? Hell, no. He was taken.

This would be a tall, dark, and handsome, Fontana-style. The only mystery about this guy would be which one had been stuck setting up the party venue that had been usurped.

Temple imagined the fury uncorking at the place that the Fontana party was not at this very moment, including pathetic Quincey not being able to wriggle out of a fake cake in true bimbo form.

“Come in,” she said. “Ralph!” She gazed at the second youngest Fontana brother.

“Hi.” He shrugged. “Yeah, the church elders stuck me with setting up the village idol worshipping. I hear you want to know where we all were supposed to be right now.”

“Have a seat,” she suggested.

The only place was the other end of the Victorian love seat, which was hard of back and sitting surface, despite being upholstered in baby blue.

“Man, this is one uncomfortable mama of a couch,” Ralph said, arranging his lanky frame. “I guess it’s because they want to get right to the bed.”

Temple eyed the high-mattressed, rococo affair with ruffled canopy. “That doesn’t look any better.”

“There’s always the floor,” Ralph said with distaste, running the edge of his Italian sole over the saccharine floral-design area rug. “No, I guess not.”

Temple cleared her throat. She was not here to discuss ideal reclining spots with a Fontana brother. “Where were you all supposed to be?”

He described the place, the G-Strip Club, the plans for the evening. “It was going to be the usual bachelor party nonsense, a lot of booze, razzing the groom-to-be, a stripper bride popping out of a big cardboard cake. We didn’t have a lot of time to set it up.”

“That club is in Las Vegas proper. Or improper. When the ride there took so long, weren’t you suspicious?

“We were paesanos having a good time. The champagne and banter flowed. I just figured the driver was giving us a chance to mellow before we arrived.”

“The driver. Hah! Who was this?”

“Whoever was assigned to chauffeur us in the Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud, our smoothest and creamiest limo. The silver exterior finish is so perfect it seems like warm mirror to the sight and touch. The leather inside is softer than kid, the color of champagne. The inlaid woods are Swedish blond.”

Temple was almost drooling.

“Nicky calls it the Vanmobile.”

Well! She didn’t need to know that!

“Um, Ralph. I understand the driver was a new hire.”

“Chauffeurs come and go, like headwaiters. Essential, but temperamental.”

“You remember this guy?”

“Gherken. They go by last names, like ritzy English butlers. Never saw him before, but he seemed competent. One of our regulars had called in sick and this guy just happened to be applying. He had a good rap . . . I mean, reference . . . sheet.”

“What do you mean by good?”

“Employed as a getaway driver by the Ciampi family in Chicago. Not Irish. They tend to drink while waiting.”

“But not Italian?”

“Not . . . anything,” Ralph said, narrowing his eyes and fingering his discreet gold earring. “The guy was . . . blah. Bland. Not memorable. Every Mr. Smith you ever saw. Except his last name was Gherken. You talked to him, it sounded like you were asking for a pickle. On the other hand, our clients are always pretty jolly out on the town, and like a good laugh.”

“Funny,” Temple said. “You hear the name ‘Smith’ and get suspicious. You hear a ridiculous last name and you think it’s got to be genuine. Who’d make up a moniker like that?”

Ralph sat up, worried. “You think he was in on it! But it was just chance he got the Vanillamobile and our party.”

“Anybody talk personally to the ‘sick’ driver?”

“He was bribed?”

Temple said nothing.

“You mean he might have been mugged.”

“Or kidnapped himself.”

“Or killed. Jesu bambino! He could have been killed himself. And we shouldn’t call out of here to find out, unless we’re ready to call the cops too.” Ralph stood. “It would look suspicious if we want to use the excuse that none of our cell phones worked. Much as I hate to do it, I’ll talk to the guys about turning ourselves in.”

Temple had the satisfaction of astounding a Fontana brother. Usually it was the other way around.

Molina’s instincts had made her crave neutral ground, but she couldn’t think of any.

She’d called the Oasis Hotel, where he purportedly held a security job now.

Darned if she didn’t get a secretary. To avoid leaving the telltale physicality of a written message, she had to identify herself.

“Certainly, Lieutenant. I’ll page Mr. Nadir at once. He should call you back in a couple of minutes, if nothing urgent is under way.”

Molina snorted after the woman hung up. Nothing would be more urgent to Rafi Nadir than this call.

She paced in the homicide unit’s tiled women’s restroom, holding one hand to her touchy stomach. No one usually came in here between shifts. It was 7:00 A.M. Monday. She’d come in early to make this call. Her wound still squealed at any stretching movement. She was worn ragged from concealing her condition and lying to everyone about her absence for a week a month earlier.

Still, she needed to pace, cradling the cell phone against one shoulder, waiting for it to ring.

“Carmen?” His voice was low. He was holed up somewhere semiprivate too. Lord!

“We need to talk privately,” she told him.

“Not much of that in Las Vegas.”

“What about your place?” Better his than hers.

“I’m not where you visited before—”

“I know.”

“All police, all the time,” he said.

“You got it.”

“I’m on night shift.”

“Morning. Nine A.M.”

“Ten.”

“Done,” she said.

“Tomorrow. Tuesday,” he said.

Same old, she said, he said.

“You got it.”

“You want to hint what this is about, Carmen?”

“What has it always been about?”

“Fine. Tell me when you get there. You want directions?”

She’d let him tell her, a pulse in her neck throbbing. She really didn’t feel up to this. But if she waited to feel better about it, it would never happen.

Time was flying and Temple was getting desperate.

She found it mildly suspicious that Ralph set up the bachelor party and it was his girlfriend who bribed the driver to turn the limo over to her. But Asiah had been pretty open about the bribe and also about her lack of interest in roping a Fontana brother into matrimony.

Temple meandered back into the kitchen, sensing the tension in the parlor and bar areas as she passed through. The police would have to be called soon. Then, at least, some of the suspects could be cleared enough to be sent home.

Matt had stood as she’d passed through the bar, his face tense. It was now almost noon on Tuesday. He had to be on the air, live, by midnight.

She needed a sign, something to put her on the trail of a disloyal or maybe just royally misguided girlfriend. They were listlessly hanging out around the large homey kitchen table and sitting on the quartet of stools at the eating bar. The radio was playing country and western plaints. The girls looked tired, bored, and rebellious.

One of them must have gone very wrong, but which one?

Life coach Meredith; Wanda, the honey-blond massage therapist; raven-haired Judith, the runway model; white-blond Jill, a pharmacist; the mahogany redhead who trained horses, but maybe hoped to control her Fontana brother, Alexia; Tracee, the superfit Pilates instructor; Evita, a ventriloquist who could certainly call in sick for a missing chauffeur, or Asiah, right Jill-on-the-spot to drive the huge silver boat and its unknowing cargo to a totally wrong location.

But Temple didn’t think it would take a ventriloquist to ensure that a driver call in sick. All the women had probably shown up at Gangsters to hook up with their guys a time or two. All would be familiar with the operation, even with the drivers.

The women eyed her with weary disinterest. Wanda yawned.

Eeny, meeny, miney . . .

All at once, Temple’s glance was drawn by a motion on the carpet. A fat black tail extended from under the kitchen table. Two feet away, so did a fluffy one. And another narrow one and a fluffy one. Her first glimpse of Louie, showed him in cat cahoots with Midnight Louise and cathouse mascot Baby Blue, but whose was the fourth tail?

The tips were twitching ever so slightly. In time. If the radio hadn’t been playing, Temple could have heard the tap, tap, tap of feline impatience.

Not impatience, signaling!

Because every tail pointed in one direction: to the breakfast stool on which one Fontana girlfriend in particular sat slumped and unhappy.

“Come with me,” Temple said. She knew better than to ignore a four-feline Ouija board reading. “You might be able to answer a few questions.”

“It’s our only clue,” Matt said.

He and Temple were cloistered in the madam’s office, if one could be “cloistered” in a brothel. Apparently, lots of people could.

Temple sat on the large, golden oak desk chair, feeling like a shrunken Alice on a massive seating piece meant for Miss Kitty’s full sensuous bulk.

“Maybe it’s a Social Security number,” she suggested.

“These women are paid in cash. Madonnah had no personal identity except a fake-looking driver’s license and this number. Ten digits. It’s got to be a phone number.”

“We could try it on the office safe first, with Miss Kitty present.”

“There are no break spaces to indicate turning left or right.”

“Doesn’t mean Madonnah didn’t have them memorized. She wouldn’t want to transcribe a safe combination exactly.”

“No, but why would she care about the safe in a place she only visited once in a blue moon?”

“If she was so anonymous, there might be something revealing in the safe. Miss Kitty strikes me as a benign madam, someone her girls could confide in.”

“Like a mother superior, sure. Only she kept the records and kept the money.”

“I want to call it. The cell phones work much better on this floor. If whoever answers sounds funny, I hang up.”

“You could leave a trail,” Matt warned her. “These days cell phones are as traceable as landline calls.”

“Look, Aldo is right. We have to call in the authorities. Annoying them is on the brink of turning into antagonizing them.”

“You call. A woman is always given more leeway.”

“At what? Being mistaken for a ditz who can’t dial the right number? That’s sexist.”

“Yes, but yes.” He smiled ruefully. “You’re the one with press and stage experience. You ought to be able to pose as a dirty rotten liar way better than I would. I’m still learning the ropes.”

Temple took out her own cell phone. “I’ll call, but on my nickel and my responsibility. I’m a known meddler. You’re a prime suspect. It’ll look better if I mess up things than if you do.”

He nodded and watched as Temple punched in the ten digits.

Her eyebrows lifted as her lips mimed a ring.

“Oh,” she said. “Hello.” A pause. “My number? Isn’t this one enough?” Another pause, her eyes darting as she improvised. “It’s just that I don’t know what happened to me.” Her eyes widened. “Yes, Nevada. The usual place. No, not my phone. I couldn’t get to it. Wait! I’m . . . feeling faint. I think someone drugged me—”

Temple dropped the cell phone, putting her finger to her lips to ensure Matt’s silence, then bent to hit the End button.

“What the heck—?” Matt asked.

“That was a very weird contact. The man on the other end expected confirmation. The call was instantly traced, Matt, or he knew who had that number. He knew right where I—she—was. I faked a problem and got the hell off.” Temple took a deep breath. “What does this mean?”

“It means you could have been talking to her murderer. I’ll tell Aldo to call the Nye County sheriff. It’s always good to go through jurisdictional channels, and that way the bias of the Vegas police toward the Fontana family doesn’t come into instant play.”

“I’m not sure we’re ready. Matt, this sheriff’s department may not know the Fontanas, but it doesn’t know us, either. You, me, Electra. We’d catch a break from Molina’s people, because they know our . . . my . . . penchant for crime and that we’re harmless.”

“Not this time,” Matt said. “This time not a one of us looks harmless. We look like scofflaws with something to hide. The sooner we face that particular music, the sooner we get a chance to evaluate just how screwed we are.”

Temple fidgeted on the shiny, varnished oak chair seat. “The sheriff’s department could be worse than Molina and her minions. I’ve got another idea for backup we might need. Let me see your cell phone.”

“You didn’t want it used for calling out.”

“I’m not using it to call out. I’ll use my Miss Marple snoop sister personal cell for that. I just want to cop a number from your address book.”

“Address book? It’s more an address mini-list.”

“Ooh! I’m number one. How long has that been going on?”

Matt’s face flushed. “You’re the one who said I had to have a cell phone. So—”

“And Electra. Ambrosia . . . ?”

“My boss at the radio station, remember? Her on-air name.”

“And some more radio station names. A couple Chicago numbers, your mother and—?”

“None of your business.”

She lifted her eyebrows again, but said nothing. Then, “Molina. Hey, all we have to do is dial direct.”

“You have her on your instant dial too.”

“Guilty.”

“Janice Flanders,” she read off without expression.

“Never know when I could use a good police sketch artist,” he said.

But they both knew he’d briefly dated Janice when Temple was unavailable.

She nodded. Hit a few more buttons, then dialed.

Matt frowned, trying to remember who else was in his scanty cell phone address book. His agent, Tony Valentine, of course. Danny Dove, Temple’s choreographer friend who’d become an odd combination of counselee-mentor for him lately. Who the devil else?

The phone was ringing, and from the way Temple slightly raised her voice, he knew it was a long-distance call.

“Temple Barr calling on behalf of our mutual friend, Matt Devine,” she said confidently. “Sorry to bother you, but Matt’s in a spot of trouble in a brothel in the Nevada boonies and—” She laughed, almost flirtatiously. “I thought that would get your attention. So help me God and Judge Roy Bean. Right. Heart of the West. I, we, need to know what this phone number means.” She repeated the digits. Then listened. And listened. And listened some more.

“No shinola! That would explain what happened when I called it. Yes, I did. Just now. I’m sorry! There was no other way to learn what we’re dealing with on that end. On this end? Murder. Matt tried to give the victim CPR and was discovered in a compromising position with the body. Female, right. That too. Are you online? Yes, about thirty. Hard to tell. Really made-up.”

Temple glanced at Matt. “Well, it happened more than twelve hours ago. It’s a touchy situation. We were hoping to—Yes, I know that’s loony. Yes, I know you know me. Molina? Over my dead body. We’re sixty miles from Vegas anyway and in a different county. Really. Yes, I have seen some of Smoky and the Bandit, but only accidentally while using the remote control. County sheriffs are really that obsessive? Okay, okay, I’ll have Van von Rhine call the LVMPD. You bet I don’t want to be the whistle-blower here! This call was bad enough.

“Yes, all the Fontana brothers and their significant others, as a matter of fact. It was a bachelor party. Aldo. Getting married, yes. The girlfriends crashed the party. My aunt from New York. She’s not that old! You’ll call and cancel? That would be great. I kinda hung up by pretending to pass out.”

Temple cringed. “I know it was a stupid stunt. Helicopters? Well, we do have more people here now than would fit in even the most elastic stretch limo. That much an hour for gas? Man, fuel prices are outrageous. There oughta be a law.” Temple cringed again. “Yes, I know I’ve broken several. Thank you for calling that helicopter thing off. It might have stampeded the lizards.”

Temple flipped her phone shut and grinned at Matt. “I’ve irritated some real heavy hitters in law enforcement, but I’ve now got a motive. A damn good motive. Next stop is Miss Kitty’s safe.”

“Sorry, Red. I don’t open my safe until the police get here.”

Miss Kitty folded her ample arms over her truly commanding chest.

She filled the golden oak desk chair now, and Temple and Matt sat on the maple side chairs drawn up to it.

“We need to present the police with a fait accompli solution,” Temple said. “There are folks who have places to be tonight and I imagine you have rooms booked too.”

Miss Kitty stirred on her executive throne. “True. But I don’t break a confidence. My business reputation depends on it.”

“Even when the other party is dead?” Matt asked.

The madam heaved out a frustrated breath.

“We know you recognized Madonnah when you first saw the dead woman,” Temple said. “It would have simplified everything if you’d just said so. I wasted hours trying to find out who she was.”

“I don’t break a confidence. In life, or in death. Even I didn’t recognize her at first, and I knew the girls’ hadn’t seen her latest ‘look,’ so they wouldn’t say anything. She really was a woman of a thousand faces. Had to be, poor thing.”

“Look,” Matt said. “I’m the prime suspect here, just because I tried to breathe some life back into Madonnah. It’s obvious she had something to hide.” Matt glanced at Temple. “She knows what it is, but she hasn’t told even me yet. And we’re engaged to be married. Whatever this information in your safe is, it could help find Madonnah’s killer.”

Miss Kitty’s barely there eyebrows lifted. “Engaged to be married? Would you hold your bachelor party here too?” Apparently the group take was hefty.

Matt glanced at Temple again. “Uh . . . not really.”

Temple shrugged and appealed to Miss Kitty. “He cannot tell a lie. That’s why the police would make garlic mashed potatoes of him.”

“Where did you find such a rare specimen of the gender?” Miss Kitty asked.

“Formerly in the priesthood.”

“Oh. Really?” Miss Kitty gave Matt an accessing glance that only a madam could. “What a waste.”

“Not now,” Temple said. “But we can’t let the poor lamb be led to the slaughter for doing a good deed.”

“I suppose not.” Miss Kitty’s sigh again inflated her decol-letage. Then she went to the closet door and fiddled inside until there was a metallic clank. The standing safe door yawned open while she retrieved a small metal box.

She brought it to the desktop, then reached to pull a key to its lock from between her bosoms.

“This is Madonnah’s life. It’s all in here. I was her keeper, I guess you could say.”

“Why?” Temple asked.

“Everybody has to trust somebody,” Miss Kitty said gruffly.

“The police won’t want us handling the contents,” Matt said. “Why don’t you just tell us what it is. Temple already suspects.”

“Knows,” Temple told Miss Kitty gently. “I called the phone number Matt found in her room.”

Miss Kitty’s plump hand rested on the unlocked but unopened box. “It’s not much. Her real driver’s license and Social Security number. Birth and high school graduation certificates. A license tag for her dog, Clancy.” Miss Kitty’s lips curled with bitterness. “He died protecting her, little pound mutt. He was the only person who cared about her.”

Silence held. Matt segued into his radio voice: soft, even, inviting confidences. “It was that bad?”

“Worse.” Another deep sigh. “A lot of these girls are just party animals. A lot of them were introduced to sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll too soon, or too roughly. But victims? Not the way they tell it. They’re having fun being sex queens, making two hundred bucks an hour, traveling around, building up nest eggs until they retire at forty.

“A couple are ‘ordinary’ wives and mothers who take an annual ‘vacation.’ Me, I don’t judge. I took my own path to here and now. I know the girls here are clean and doing what they do from free will, as much as any of us have it. Right, Father?”

Matt look disconcerted. “I’m not clergy anymore.”

“This is so not your scene, though, right?”

“Right. I don’t judge either.”

“Did you, when you found her, did you—?”

“She was still warm. I tired to revive her. Then, yes, I said the prayers for the dying.”

Miss Kitty’s lavender-blue-white head nodded. “My job is simple: keep order, keep the money, pay the girls, make it fun for the client. With Nonah, I let it get personal. I tried to keep her safe. That’s not in my job description. That’s not my business. But I tried.”

Temple leaned forward on the hard chair. She wondered why the office furniture was so ungiving, when everything else in the place, except the Victorian sofa, was overupholstered, cushy.

“That’s why she got to preview the night’s clientele by the surveillance system,” Temple said. “Why she made a shtick out of using the name Madonnah and changing her hair and makeup and looks so often. Why she locked up the remnants of her real life in your safe.”

Miss Kitty nodded. “Somebody had to know. Somebody had to keep her secret, otherwise, the loneliness would have destroyed her.”

Matt was growing more puzzled by the minute. “Now that the secret’s out and she’s dead, let me in on it. I don’t get it. I get that she led a tragic life, and that you were her only friend,” he told Miss Kitty. “But I still don’t see how that got her killed.”

This time Temple sighed. “She was in the Witness Protection Program, Matt. She had to ditch her real identity and life. Choosing to be a traveling prostitute was clever. She could tart herself up until unrecognizable, change her location frequently, do anything but have friends, be truly intimate with anyone. Why’d she pick this life?”

Miss Kitty was answering all questions now. “She didn’t want any connections with anyone. No long-term coworkers, no hope of friendship or romance that would have to be broken off anyway. She’d had a rough time as a kid and ended up as the mistress of a drug dealer. She witnessed a triple murder, and testitled. There’s a chain of dealers all over this country, and it would enhance their reps if she was caught and punished. She said she liked it here. She was in control. The men were grateful. Pets aren’t allowed. Abuse isn’t allowed.”

“Someone found her,” Matt said.

Miss Kitty nodded. “Someone found her and managed to get in and kill her. You bachelor party guys, and gals, were just innocent bystanders.”

“Or cover,” Temple said, catching Matt’s eye.

“Funny,” he said. “I don’t feel very innocent, or very much like a bystander anymore, or like I’d settle now for being ‘cover’ for anybody.”

“Sorry to report this just now,” Morrie said, eyeing Molina for more than physical stress. He’d charged into her office as soon as she’d returned from Rafi’s. She hadn’t even had time to process her talk with her ex.

“I bet. What is it?” She sat gingerly on her desk edge.

“It’s out of our jurisdiction, is what it is.” The detective sat her usual mug of coffee on the oddly empty desktop. “But the, er, visiting personnel are persons of interest.”

“Jurisdiction?”

“Nye County. Near Beatty.”

“That isn’t even on the same planet as Vegas, really. Chicken ranch land.”

“Right. That’s the point.”

“The county sheriff can handle it. That’s what they’re for.”

“Murder.”

“Hmm. Intriguing. But if some wayward Vegas boys got themselves into trouble way out in Nye County, it’s none of our affair. Literally. Why are they bothering us with this at all?”

“Most of the persons of interest in the murder are well-known Vegas habitués.”

“Lots of the horny gamblers who fly in here motor out to a chicken ranch. What’s new about that?”

“These aren’t tourists. They’re residents.”

“Residents? What residents?”

“They would be the Fontana boys.”

“Fontana! What were those city slickers doing out in the boonies?”

“Uh, bachelor party. Hijacked bachelor party, they claim.”

“One of the litter was murdered, hopefully?”

“Now, Carmen, don’t wish for something you wouldn’t like to live with. You know they add a lot of ambience to the town.”

“Ambience that Vegas tried to dump in the nineties. Who was getting married, anyway?”

“The state police didn’t fax wedding party assignments.” Morrie kept his eyes on the sheet. “Matt Devine is there, though, and Macho Mario Fontana.”

“Matt? In with that crowd?”

“It was a bachelor party.”

“He’s getting married?”

“I don’t know about that. He may be, given his new closeness to Temple Barr, but I’d guess this bachelor is known to us.”

“Known to us? Do not play games with me, Morrie. I’m a little on edge right now, as you well know.”

“I thought you’d remember.”

“Remember? Why shouldn’t I remember? I was stabbed, not robbed of brain cells. Fontanas. Bachelor party. I missed attending because of eighty-six fresh stitches, not that I would have gone anyway. Oh, that’s right!” She slapped her forehead. “My own unauthorized adventures made me temporarily forget that saccharine public announcement you reported on at the Crystal Phoenix six weeks ago. Aldo Fontana is engaged to Temple Barr’s aunt. Kathy . . . Harrleson, isn’t it?”

“Kit Carlson,” Morrie corrected in a discreet murmur.

“That’s it. The Pony Express rider once removed.” Molina frowned. “Aldo must be several years her junior. Must be the chlorine in the water those Minnesotans drink. My question remains. What does this have to do with Matt Devine?”

“Apparently he’s the number one suspect. Found the body.”

“And the body is—?”

“Someone called Madonnah. One of the girls at the Sapphire Slipper. Tried CPR on her, so Devine’s DNA—”

“That’s what happens when idiot ex-priests visit brothels with the Fontana brothers. This sounds more like a Marx Brothers movie, if it weren’t for the dead body. I suppose your favorite redhead is accounted for and present too?”

“Now she is. Seems a female rescue party motored up after the murder. So we’ve also got, on the premises, Nicky Fontana and Van von Rhine, the eight Fontana girlfriends who hijacked the bachelor party, Macho Mario himself, Electra Lark, the bride-to-be aunt, a dozen or so bordello girls, and assorted staff. And, uh, three extra black cats.”

“You can have ‘extra’ black cats on a crime scene?”

“One of the black cats is a resident. The other three are visiting from Vegas.”

“And we know this how?”

“They’ve been identified as Temple Barr’s cat, Midnight Louie, and the Crystal Phoenix mascot, Midnight Louise, plus an unnamed old alley cat, also black. The resident cat is called Baby Blue.”

“I suppose their paws are all over the crime scene too.”

“It’s possible. That’s why our crime scene technicians need to go over the place before the body and any suspects are removed.”

Molina just shook her head. “You know I don’t need another Temple Barr Flying Circus of Crime and Cats just now, Morrie.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Stop addressing me like a military woman. You’ve seen my midriff bare. You can call me Carmen.”

He straightened uneasily. No one on the force was allowed to use her first name. “You want me out there wrangling this, don’t you? Is that the reward I get—?”

She leaned close, over her desktop, eyes like indigo ice.

“That’s the reward you get for being the bearer of this bloody awful news. Don’t worry. I’ll have to go too. God, jolting over those desert roads! How does Barr know just when to turn up bodies to inconvenience me the most?”

“Talent?” he asked.

“That was a rhetorical question, Alch. Saddle up the Crown Vic. I’ll call Grizzly Bahr. I’m sure he’ll want to eyeball this one himself.”

“Because of the complication of postmortem CPR administered by one of the suspects?”

“Because of all the seminaked ladies on the premises.” Molina managed a grin. “He does like to get out of the autopsy room sometimes to view some live bodies instead of dead ones. Especially if they’re comely.

“Come to think of it, this crazy quilt of a case might get my mind off grimmer matters.”

“What’s scratching your ass today is more than your stitches,” Alch said.

She nodded, the phone already auto-dialing the coroner’s office. “I just saw the father of my child. Tried to set up a civil ‘arrangement.’”

“Good for you—”

She waved him silent. “Dr. Bahr. Got a case that might need your personal touch.” She listened as he spoke. “One corpse, female.” Another pause. “I know that’s nothing new in Vegas, but this one isn’t in Vegas. It’s out at the Sapphire Slipper. Yes, that place is still out there, and going great guns, apparently. Our involvement? The joint is crammed with Vegas persons of interest, including all of the male members of the Fontana family. Yes, mentioning ‘male members’ is ironic under the circumstances. Oh, you’ve been pining for some fieldwork, have you? Alch and I will drive over and your van can follow us out there.”

Alch was astounded. “Grizzly Bahr is leaving his den of death and disintegration?”

“A dozen or so live shady ladies will motivate and move even the most morgue-entrenched coroner.”

“Does he know you nicknamed him ‘Grizzly’?”

“I doubt it, Alch, and you aren’t going to tell him. I’ll inform the captain. He will just love this! And me deserting my newly neat desk I’ve maintained for more than a month after you cleaned it up during my week off. You get the CV from the garage. Matt Devine!” She snorted. “In a hooker hotel. This I gotta see with my own eyes.”

“And supervise?”

“That’ll be the best part.”

She was feeling a lot better.

It was now high noon and Temple was getting butterflies in her stomach.

Van von Rhine called the LVMPD to report the situation, which meant Molina would soon know about her latest and most bizarre crime scene involvement yet. Aldo and Nicky comforted her by saying that Nye County would have had to call in the Vegas CSI unit anyway. Temple’s investigative calls on Madonnah’s hidden number must have stirred some powerful forces into action. The idea of helicopters, plural, had really upset her.

Van worked under her maiden name, so at least the volatile surnames of Fontana and Barr need not come up right off the bat. And it would look better for all concerned if they called the authorities before the distant Big Guys showed up.

Matt was standing close behind Van to back up her story, and intervene if Lieutenant Molina got involved and went ballistic. The homicide detective had always liked him.

All of it made perfect sense, but Temple couldn’t bear staying with the barroom crowd and listening to Van’s end of the conversation. They now knew the “why” but not the “who,” which made this a pretty half-baked effort on her part.

She’d been imported to the Sapphire Slipper to solve the murder, and without a murderer identified, everyone, including her nearest and dearest, was still a prime suspect. Plus, the first scheduled clients were driving out of Vegas even now to add to the Sapphire Slipper’s already overcrowded population.

Temple was a proven failure.

She ambled through the parlor and the dozing courtesans into the deserted foyer to brood. No one noticed or missed her. Even with the hectic events of the past few hours and all the new faces she’d met, nagging worries about Max danced in and out of her mind.

You can’t worry about the whole world, she told herself.

She was so exhausted she’d start hallucinating soon.

And then something came floating down the stairs from the deserted second floor. The supposedly deserted second floor.

Her mind refused to believe her eyes.

A disembodied crimson thong trimmed in marabou feathers floated down toward her. Madonnah’s ghost was up and walking? Or crawling, rather. Even creepier!

The apparition was already breezing past her to the front door when she finally made out the black feline form whose neck it adorned. Finally! After all these hours out here, she had been granted a glimpse of her own elusive cat!

It had to be Louie. His broad-cheeked tomcat face squeezed out a snarl as his paw scratched a gash into the door’s dark wood.

Temple started laughing, hysterically. Louie in boudoir wear? A flaming red thong? Louie a panty sniffer? A pantywaist? A red-hot thong-head?

She almost doubled over from laughing, but figured that the small resident cat probably had a petite box that no one had remembered to change lately, and Louie might desperately need a potty break.

She went to the door, and opened it.

Into the shockingly bright daylight Louie bounded. The bordello was like a casino in that all sense of “outside” disappeared when one was inside. Time stopped. Night was eternal.

Louie had just reminded her that a bright, sunlit world surrounded them. The light also showed how alarmingly tight the wisp of nylon was around his neck.

“Wait! Louie! That thing could choke you if it caught on something.”

He stopped, as if understanding her. Temple ran to catch him. He darted off, around the building’s corner.

Darn! Trust a cat to act independent just when he most needed a little human help. Temple stomped over the hard, shifting sandy ground through the desert scrub.

The building’s exterior looked rough and tawdry in daylight. The courtesans’ quarters off the main building’s kitchen was just a string of linked single-wide trailers.

Louie led her around them into higher brush and cactus that raked her bare calves. Temple stopped, blinking in the hot sunlight.

“Louie, you dork! I am not chasing you over the equivalent of the Ethel M Chocolate Factory cactus garden. I refuse to follow you another step.”

Silence. Then a pathetic yowl from out of sight.

Temple glanced back at the Sapphire Slipper. The front entrance was almost out of sight. She sighed and trudged forward again, surprised when a rough-sided wooden structure came into view.

She edged closer, hearing something faint and tinny.

A radio?

Someone was out here? A caretaker? No one had mentioned . . .

The sound cut off, as if it had been a mistake.

A gash of bright red near the worn wooden barn door ajar on its shaky hinges made her tiptoe over the sand.

Louie had found something out here he was returning to. Maybe food. She saw shreds of what looked like cooked meat on the sand near the door. Or, he had found someone.

“Asylum?” he asked.

“Alyssum,” her voice answered, laughing. “Sweet alyssum. It’s a flower.”

He was lying on the mountainside, every sinew and joint aching. Somewhere half a mile above was the civilized comfort of the clinic. He was mired like the Cowardly Lion in a field of flowers, his legs weighted by plaster casts.

If he hadn’t been a mountain climber before, he damn sure was now. His chest heaved for air, and his shoulders and arms shook from using the metal crutches as pitons to dig into the tough sod and pull his plaster-weighted legs behind him.

She wafted the small blossom under his nose again. “I need to get to one of these high mountain farmsteads. Ask for food, beer, a saw.”

“Not water?”

“Beer is water here. I need a road.” She sat up to eye a snake of paved darkness twisting up the Alps, and sighed. “I need a reason to say I’m stranded. I’ll probably have to trek back a gallon of unneeded petrol.”

She stood, shaking out her chic suit. She looked like someone stranded. “I’ll get you out of those casts. You think you can put weight on your legs again?”

“I’ll have to.”

“You Americans. Always what must be done. Never what is pleasant to be done.”

He thought on that parting remark long after the hip-high grasses and knee-high flowers had swallowed her pink-suited figure.

Here, he was truly helpless, his body anchored by the means of its recovery. Yet his mind soared like the distant clouds. He rubbed his left inner elbow. He still smelled the acrid rubbing alcohol scent, felt the ting of the hypodermic needle tip tasting his vein, as a serpent smells, with the bitter end of its toxic tongue.

Death rode on that thin, hollow steel reed; he knew it. His death.

This woman had interrupted that, and by duplicitous means had wafted him away from the clinic, from his would-be killer and also from the only man he trusted.

That made her the only woman he trusted.

That made trust a necessity rather than an option.

He knew this Max person he was didn’t like necessity as a partner.

He inhaled the heady scent of mountain wildflowers. Their only escape route had been on foot. For now, he was helpless and, rid of the leg casts, might be more helpless still. Yet his mind was working, weighing. His mind wouldn’t let him sink into complacency.

Complacency. “The refuge of the inferior mind.”

That motto rang true, like history. He’d been warned against complacency. Over and over again.

The siren screams of police and emergency vehicles racing to the Sapphire Slipper continued into early afternoon.

A number of Vegas cabs and private SUVs that were driving up hastily turned around. Inside the Sapphire Slipper, the resident courtesans had a new client to lavish exclusive attention on.

“That was the bravest thing I ever saw,” Babette said, stroking Midnight Louie’s fevered brow.

At least his tongue was very warm anyway.

“He’s so cute!” purred Kiki, Lili, and Niki, tickling his tummy.

“Look at these nails!” Angela and Heather intoned together. “Shredded. And his pads are bleeding.”

They looked with accusing fury at Lieutenant C. R. Molina, Detective Alch, and Coroner Grizzly Bahr.

“I will tend him immediately, my dears.” Coroner Bahr hovered over Louie’s lush nurses. “Some styptics and gauze bandages should set the little guy right. And then I’ll see to you ladies.”

“What about the D.B.?” Molina asked.

“In a minute. This, uh, Good Samaritan needs tending.”

Temple shook her head at Louie’s moment in the spotlight. She was sitting on a blue sofa with Matt down on one knee, attending her kicked ankle.

“It’s swelling already, and bruised,” he decided. “You’ll need to elevate that.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Molina said. “You’ve already proposed, from what I hear. You may pick up the bride-to-be and put her down on the long sofa in the bar area. There’s an interrogation going on there that you may be useful for. Coroner, I really think you have more pressing matters upstairs. I sent the crime scene crew up first. Leave the alley cat for the vet.”

Soon all have dispersed but the Sapphire Slipper nursing unit. Louie deserted his cooing chorus of ladies, squirming until they were forced to let him down to limp after the exodus to the bar.

Matt had been focused on Temple from the moment the limo stopped. He’d taken her out of the front seat, spotted her scraped ankle at once, and picked her up, so this was her second stint of bridal carting.

No one noticed them much, though, Temple saw. The barroom was jammed.

Fontana brothers were lined up on and between the barstools. Their girlfriends were scattered at the round tables. Molina had joined two serious, suited men at a table with four semiautomatic pistols on it.

“I take it,” she was saying, “that these are the firearms that shot out the tires.”

One man nodded. “You’ll want to confirm that, for the record.”

The other man looked up and Matt turned to confront him, shocked. “Frank.” He turned back to Temple. “You knew.”

She nodded as the man walked over. He was tall and lean with scissor-sharp features and a receding hairline.

“Matt. I do find you in the most interesting places these days.”

Temple smothered a smile. Frank Bucek was also an ex-priest. He’d been Matt’s teacher in the seminary, but was now an FBI agent. The other agent was getting the girlfriends’ names and addresses, so they made a confidential trio conferring on the sidelines.

“Okay,” Matt said softly, still obviously shocked. “So you were the one Temple called from my cell phone address list. How’d you get here so fast?”

“I was in L.A. And your . . . fiancée, is it, from the good lieutenant’s comments in the foyer? . . . had a bout of curiosity that set a huge fuss in motion.” Bucek grinned. “Congratulations, kids. Am I invited to the wedding?”

“When we decide on a place and a time,” Matt said. “But—”

“I’ll buy you both a celebratory drink in town later, and give you some big explanations in private. Right now, we have a last piece of the puzzle I need to pry out of these women before we leave the crime scene to the able lieutenant.”

Temple was about to scream if she heard Bucek put one more praising adjective in front of Molina’s title, but then she was a bit wrought up from seeing the limo driver’s eyes nearly scratched out by a posse of infuriated domestic cats, led on by the awesome cries and growls of her own cuddly bed partner.

“My midnight radio show—” Matt began, his brow furrowing.

Bucek leaned close. “Carmen is not in a good mood, for many reasons I can guess and some I can’t, but I did get her to promise you’d flee the mass interrogation in time to make your live radio commitment.” He glanced at Temple with some amusement. “You she has plans for. But it’s a small price to pay for Matt getting sprung from a brothel ASAP.”

Temple just shrugged. “How can I help you, Agent Bucek?”

“Tell me which one of these lovely ladies was mad enough at a Fontana boyfriend to help set up a mob hit.”

Temple caught her breath. Putting Madonnah’s murder in those terms took the whole last eighteen-hours’ chaos from the comedy of errors it felt like to the tragedy it was.

Sitting on a leather sofa with her legs up and her foot on Matt’s thigh like a shoeless Cinderella, now that he’d sat down again, made her look about as effective as a poetic Victorian invalid on a fainting couch. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, say. Temple had to twist her neck to eye the eight women she’d come to recognize and know.

She’d suspected one of them had been involved with more than engineering a surprise prank. The FBI man was relying on her crime-solving instincts to tell him who.

Wow. This was the Big Finale and she already looked like a limping fool who’d walked into a trap and become a hostage.

Actually, Louie had done the walking and she had followed, but he was being coddled by courtesans and she was merely being ankle-massaged by Matt . . . which was enough to turn her knees to hot melted butter. As well as her brain.

“Agent Bucek, I haven’t a clue to who the guy who abducted me really is, except that he was a hit man hiree who replaced the real driver, and it suited him, in turn, to be replaced by a Fontana girlfriend. He probably rode out here concealed in the Rolls’s trunk never expecting to be found out in a million years.”

“That’s okay. We know him. We just don’t know which girl aided and abetted, and whether she really knew what she was doing. Whether she was a victim, or a villain. Can you help us?”

Lord, she wanted to! Every Fontana except Macho Mario had believed in her smarts. She eyed the old guy, having a big cigar lit by Miss Kitty while the other agent gave him the sixth degree, at least.

But if she wrongly dissed a loyal Fontana girlfriend, sold her out to the Feds. If she was wrong, and got an innocent woman in trouble. . . .

“If the girl won’t confess, we’ll never get this right,” Bucek said.

Temple eyed them all. Neurotic Jill, so insecure. Buoyant Meredith, the life counselor who might have failed in her own choices. Headstrong Alexia had been mentioned as possibly bolting the fold.

But only one was a likely suspect.

Temple beckoned Bucek to bend down to her.

She whispered, “It’s kinda obvious. Asiah, the substitute driver. She wore fishnet hose with just high heels and a skimpy blazer.”

Bucek glanced at Matt. “You do travel in style these days.”

“Later, she’d changed to palazzo pants. I’m betting she had them in the trunk and changed stockings for pants right then. Did she spot the fake driver then and go along with whatever story he was handing out . . . he was part of the prank, say? I’m betting he was inspired to grab her stockings as a murder weapon after she left the vehicle. It would keep her quiet afterward about what would look like complicity in the murder, wouldn’t it?”

“That it would.” Bucek eyed the girlfriends.

“The African-American woman with platinum-blond hair.”

He nodded. “We’ll be discreet about cutting her out from the herd when we do our interrogation at the LVMPD. Who’s the unlucky boyfriend?”

“Ralph, the second youngest. Another thing. Asiah told me she was totally uninterested in marrying her Fontana boyfriend, that she was along for the ride for the thrill of it.”

Bucek nodded.

“She’s a showgirl. She has a curtain time tonight too.”

He glanced at Matt. “She doesn’t have friends in high places. She’ll miss her high kicks tonight, and for a lotta nights. Thanks. Listen to Matt on that ankle. Maybe you’ll stay out of trouble for a while.”

“Amen,” Matt said.

The hay was fresh and frothy. Clean-cut.

He awoke breathing unrecycled air, hearing birds chattering, and a meadowlark uncorking an aria. All he needed was the Disney mice wrapping his withered legs with elastic bandages.

The illusion shattered as he realized he needed to piss, badly, and was in no shape to get himself up, hobble off, and do it. Pink and puckered indeed.

As he looked around, he saw he was alone. He could manage a discreet shift to the side. Then use his ass and elbows to move far away.

Thriller films never dealt with the ugly realities.

Then he was free to crab-crawl until he found his partner in flight. A quarter of the way around the haystack, she was seated, tying two loaves of bread and a jug into a large lightweight wool shawl. Their latest travel rations.

She noticed his crablike approach and hefted her saw.

“The last cast. Then we see how well you can hobble.”

At least his more recent hospital garb had not been gowns but flannel pajamas, the legs snapping open along the inside and outside seams like infant wear would, he imagined.

She unsnapped the pants over the leg still in a cast. In the bright morning light she cut away that cast in about fifteen minutes.

“A quick learner,” he said.

“Thank you, Mr. Randolph. So, I imagine, are you. You survived a night on the icy Himalayas with two broken legs. How will you do in the more temperate summer Alps with two half-healed legs?”

He eyed the gnarly walking sticks she had cajoled out of some upland farmer’s cottage. He hadn’t stood unassisted for as long as he could remember, but a maimed man was a dead one on this steep slope, no matter how tepid the daytime climate. He could ditch the flimsy, aluminum crutches.

He turned to face the upward slope of the meadow, took the sticks in his hands, ready to push down until he rose up. The cudgel-like canes chewed into divots of sod as he levered himself up twelve degrees, then twenty. Then forty-five. Sweat was raining off his brow and chin. His arms were shaking with strain. Sixty.

She slipped under the angle of his body to position a shoulder under one of his. Early hospital training.

Up. More. More! For a moment he tottered fully upright and almost tipped over backward. But the thick wooden cane bases dug in under his weight. He was standing, his arms and shoulders bearing most of his weight.

“Good,” she said, slapping him lightly on the iron bicep. “You’ll regain leg strength.”

Nice of her to think so.

They edged sideways down the steep meadows, his weight forcing the thick sod to give so his homemade crutches could get traction.

After an hour he was exhausted. He collapsed to the ground. They drank dark ale until it was gone. The rush of a mountain stream lured her away, to return with bottles foaming with bubbles.

He didn’t think about where they were going, or about what they were eating and drinking. This was on-the-job therapy. The mountainside was a million-dollar retraining program.

By night all his muscles were shaking, and he was moaning, whether awake or asleep. She fed him bread, some water. In the morning, she returned from another foraging expedition with sausage and cheese. He didn’t ask where, when, how. A lone beautiful woman who spoke several languages would be able to concoct a dozen stories to win sympathy and supplies.

He knew he’d never worked so hard, and was glad his arms and shoulders were strong from the shower rod chin-ups. He never complained, she never coddled.

By the second day he could get up and down by himself. By the third he was using only one cane and wanted to approach the farmhouses with her.

“That will be harder to explain,” she objected. “They’ll want to take you to the nearest village, and we’ll be discovered.”

“You mean it’ll be harder for you to cajole goodies out of these remote farmers with a man along.”

“Goodies?”

“Good food, good drink.”

“You have a point.” She pulled the untidy knot at her nape out of its tie, freeing her s houlder-length honey-blond hair. “I’ve been neglecting to appear vulnerable. I’ve simply been paying so far, after a tale of a hiker with a sprained ankle. But we’ll need fresh clothes soon and it will be good to have further inducements to help. Unless, of course, I’m dealing with a farmwife, who will be suspicious of a city-dressed hussy wandering the mountain meadows.”

He shook his head ruefully. “Say that your husband had been in a clinic recovering from an accident and you had taken me for a ride. Our car engine failed on one of the high passes. No one came by or stopped, so we had to go in search of assistance and got lost. It’s about time we took someone’s offer of a ride to a nearby village or town. Just how much money do you have on you?”

“My euros are almost gone, but limitless.” She produced a continental credit card, rather proudly. “I thought to take my wallet from my purse before we left the clinic.”

“Bury it. Whoever wanted to kill me can easily trace your credit card.”

“But . . . how will we buy food, transportation, housing?”

“We won’t buy. Let me worry about it.” He was calm, relying on skills he assumed would reappear when needed.

Her reliance on her credit card was rather endearing . . . or a clever plot to convince him she was a babe in the woods when it came to survival on the run. She was a babe in the woods, he thought, and she must have interpreted his grin correctly, because she snapped the credit card away from his fingers.

“I can hide it on my person.”

“Not well enough to fool a pro. Lose it. It’s a death sentence. For me, certainly, given the likely lethal hypo meant for me. And, now, because you’re with me, for you too.”

“We’ll be helpless without it.”

“But alive. Trust me. It’s totally compromised. By now they know you’ve vanished too. If the hypo people aren’t after us, the authorities are.”

And Garry Randolph, maybe. He hoped. His talks with Randolph had given him the confidence to see past his injuries and memory loss, to see himself as wily and competent and apparently well trained for this rough flight down the mountains.

Was there anywhere he could head where Garry would find them? Probably, but he didn’t remember it. Yet. There was muscle memory, which would help his damaged legs work better and better as they got stronger and stronger; there was also mental recuperation, which would slowly repair the severed pathways of his memory. Hopefully. And there was gut instinct. He guessed that was his best ally at the moment.

“Get some suitable walking clothes for us at the next farmhouse. We need to clean up and dress the part before we actually bum a ride from anyone.”

“‘Bum’ a ride?”

“Beg.” He cocked his thumb. “Hitchhike.”

She nodded at the gesture. Narrowed her eyes and tilted her head. “ ‘Clean up.’ Does that mean we’ll have the cliched mountain stream bath of unacquainted couples on the run?”

He nodded. “Excellent therapy. Might motivate my legs to do a better job at moving me around. Fighting the running water, that is.”

“You may not remember much, Mr. Randolph, but what you do remember is choice.”

With that she tossed her freshly loosened hair and moved through the long grasses to the steep wooden roof of a farmhouse in the distance, one with a ramp that allowed cattle and other stock into the warmer living area during the long, snow-deep winters. It had been done that way here for centuries. Despite the three days’ struggle down the mountain meadows, Revienne Schneider looked cool and very hot at the same time.

She was either an über-competent woman with unflinching devotion to a patient, a doctor with a passion to save and rehabilitate broken lives and minds, one repelled to her soul by an attempt to kill a helpless man . . . or she was his worst enemy: an agent who saw the death plan had failed and had accompanied him to gain his trust so they, or she, could try again.

Either way, they both seemed to thrive on challenge.

Revienne was devouring half of a roasted chicken across from him, wiping her mouth with a linen napkin and gulping white wine, then pulling meat from bones a moment later.

An accordion was playing in the background. An accordion! He hadn’t heard an accordion in decades, if ever. As far as he knew. Red-faced, stout people were drinking beer and wine and eating all around them at the small bistro adjoining the village’s central, and only, inn. The language flowed like the wine and beer, soft and fluent. He caught words, some English and German, and something different. Swiss-German.

Revienne’s loosened blond hair was catching in the chicken grease at the sides of her mouth. No skinless fowl here. He’d eaten three pork chops, sauerbraten, dumplings, and cooked greens until he felt gorged. He’d ordered beer, not because he craved it, but because it would put weight on him faster. He’d lost a lot; he could tell. Odd, he knew how the man he really was should feel, but not who he really was.

He knew who Revienne Schneider thought he was.

“You must be a very bad man,” she’d said through her first, ravenous bites of chicken and dumplings and thick brown bread. Her eyes glittered at him like a wild animal’s. “An adventurer. Utterly no scruples. This is very good.” She paused for breath and to wipe her mouth. “You have no conscience at all. Pass the butter. Please.”

It was white as snow and as soft as whipped cream. He knifed off a glob to put on his own rugged loaf of bread before he handed it over to her and she took the whole mound.

“They’re tourists,” he whispered over the board heaped with varieties of cheese between them. “I’m only using each card for one item. I’ll ditch the one for dinner and lodging tomorrow. Literally bury it. It will cost the man a minimum of euros. He’ll get a notice and change the card number. We must eat and rest.”

“Yes.” She drank more wine, pulled the hair back from her face. “I need a bath. And of course you would not put two rooms on the poor tourist’s card, so we shall have to sleep together.”

Her eyes were as fevered as her face. Her tone was half accusation, half something more interesting.

“I don’t think I could heft this body into a bed tonight, princess. You’ll have it all to yourself.”

“‘Heft’? What is this ‘heft’?”

“Lift.”

“Ah.” She looked around. “We must look like savages.”

“They’re too absorbed in their own dinners to take much notice of us.”

“You’re sitting.”

“Yes.”

“That is an improvement.”

“My hips ache like the very Devil. Why do you think I’m chugalugging so much beer?”

“Chuga?”

“Swallowing fast.”

She nodded. “I’m hungry still. I’ll give you a massage tonight.”

She was back on the subject of his legs. And hips.

“I have very good hands. Strong hands.”

He drank some more beer, wanting to put on weight, feel no pain, forget about her hands on his legs and hips. She was a possible enemy. Of course she’d offer . . . things. His job was to forget his own pain and confusion, and not take any wooden nickels.

Where did that expression come from? It sounded as old as the hills, which were alive with the sound of music . . . which was not Austria, but Switzerland, which was not where he belonged.

Where did he belong? He remembered the song he’d been whistling earlier. Something about a minstrel boy and a war? Ireland. Did he belong there? He felt another deep throb of recognition, accompanied by a surge of mixed sensations: love, hatred, anger, guilt, pain. Man, the real him must be some dysfunctional bastard. Though that didn’t seem right, either. Garry Randolph didn’t seem to think so.

Revienne ate some cheese, then stuffed some into the backpacks they’d bought on the stolen credit card.

“Come,” she said, whispering across the table. “I don’t want you unsteady on your feet with too much beer. After all those meds it could hit you hard, and I’m not strong enough to get you up the chalet stairs to our room.”

He grabbed his new cane, hand-carved tourist bait that leaned against his rush-seated chair. He didn’t bother to tell her he’d been off meds for some time. Still, the stairs took two turns, there was no elevator, and the new walking shoes made his gait clumsy. He was exhausted by the time she turned the key to their room.

He leaned against the wall just inside the door while she turned on the lamps—no overhead lights in the boonies—looked into the empty freestanding wardrobe and under the double bed piled high with a down comforter.

“The bathroom is down the hall,” she said. “This is not the American Plan part of the world. But don’t worry.” She hoisted a deep white pot from under the high bedstead. “There are emergency accommodations. Mike, don’t look like that! You’re still an invalid; you must take the simplest route. I am a medical doctor, you know. I’ve seen everything.”

Yes, but not his “everything.”

“You use the bathroom first,” she decided. “I’ll help you to and fro. Once you’re in the bed, I can use it.”

It took them an hour to accomplish their separate turns at the simple room with a bathtub, toilet, and sink. It was early, so they had no competition. Max used a cloth to wash off the three days of sweat and outdoor elimination, and donned the beige shorts from a village shop with relief. Luckily Swiss mountain men wore the equivalent of short shorts in the summer, almost as good as boxers. He felt like Tom Selleck in Magnum, P.I. shorts, but at least he could dump the hospital jammies in a knapsack for burying farther down the road.

The black, long-sleeved spandex turtleneck top was as silky as a second skin. The moment he put it on, he felt more relaxed. Something to his taste, apparently.

It didn’t make sense to struggle into the new, baggier jeans the stolen credit card had bought as well. Not for sleeping. Re-vienne would just have to see his pale legs, with the dark hairs rubbed off by the cast. He recalled her threat of a massage and chose to consider it a promise. He was, as she’d pointed out, an invalid.

The bedsheets were Egyptian cotton, maybe a thousand-thread count. Smooth as a baby’s cheek. The foot-high comforter was the only blanket or coverlet, and all that eiderdown was housed inside another silky, high-count shroud.

Max took deep, satisfied breaths. His stomach was full, his magic fingers knew how to lift a tourist’s credit card so smoothly no one would ever notice, the beer was making him drowsy, and he was going to let Revienne’s strong doctor-trained hands massage his abused legs.

He was half-asleep when she finished in the bathroom. She came back smelling of freesia soap and began running her hands over his aching leg muscles all the way up to the place where his butt began, where it hurt so good. . . .

This person named Max didn’t trust many or much, but tonight he fell asleep in the cradle of civilization.

Woman.

Warm.

Temple and Kit clasped hands before leaving the Circle Ritz for their dinner date at the Crystal Phoenix.

“My mom is going to flake out,” Temple said.

“My sister is going to go ballistic.”

They took a deep, simultaneous breath.

“Do you think,” Temple asked, “it’s all right to have the guys waiting in the wings?”

“We can always cancel the introductions in case things look too . . . dreadful.”

“Leave them waiting in the bar all evening, deny them dinner, and then brush them off at the last moment?”

“That would be rather tacky,” Kit agreed. “But better tacky than homicide victims.”

“My parents would never overreact so badly.”

“Yeah?”

“Well, maybe so. So you think we’re better off not wearing our rings?”

“Absolutely not. Karen would spot them instantly. We want to ease the Old Folks at Home into the current realities, not give them strokes.”

“She’s your sister. Almost your age.”

“I’m almost her age,” Kit said icily, “were I about to give such privileged information out hither and yon. I’m sorry, Temple, but you do not look like a hither or a yon to me.” Kit thought for a moment. “They probably don’t even have sex anymore.”

“Kit! These are my parents. I don’t want to think about such things, the lack or presence of them. Please!”

“Why not? That’s all they’re going to think about us. About you deflowering that nice ex-priest and me succumbing in the vulnerability of my ‘certain age’ to a sleek Italian gigolo.”

Temple paused to think. “Actually, those scenarios sound rather hot to me.”

“Me too,” Kit said with a giggle. “Wanta trade? Just kidding, kid! Only a good sense of humor is going to see us through tonight. Why do my sister and her husband seem like parents, even to me?”

“Because that’s all they’ve ever been to me. Parents.” Temple swung Kit’s hand. “I feel naked without my ring.”

“Me too, but we must not feel naked in front of your parents. Parents sense that kind of vulnerability and exploit it like cardsharps. We are independent women of the world and no one tells us who to sleep with.”

“Right. My latest bed partner has been a big black cat.”

“Do not go there. Parents will immediately think bestiality. Trust me.”

“Come on! How bad can it be, Kit?”

“Worse than we can imagine. Look. We arrive. We chitchat, we idly mention our significant others. . . . ”

“Nothing ‘idly’ about that for me. They’re sure to think I’m still being hoodwinked by that rat, Max.”

“Are you?”

“Only when I stop to think about it.”

“Oh, Temple,” Kit said, squeezing her hand. “I’m sure he would never have left you if he’d had a choice.”

“You mean dead or alive?”

“I mean dead or alive. But you’d never leave Matt standing forever in the wings, waiting for an interrogation by your parents, would you? They can be soooo Midwestern.”

“So can we. Sometimes. Let’s go do it. Maybe we can make them feel guilty for a change.”

“Excellent plan. We are women of the world.”

“We live in Manhattan and Vegas. They live in the Grain Belt.”

“We drink martinis and absinthe, they drink—”

“Absinthe?” Temple asked. “Isn’t that illegal?”

“It was banned, but one or two brands are now allowed on sale, and I also do smoke the occasional cigar.”

“No!”

“That’s very hot in Manhattan. Cigar bars. A girl has to adapt.”

“Let’s adapt our way into the worst shock and awesome disapproval Karen and Roger Barr can deliver.”

“Right.” Kit linked arms with Temple in a Yellow Brick Road sort of way. “Off we go.”

Of course, Nicky and Van had seen to it that the Barr party had the best table in the house, overlooking the Strip shooting due north far below on a shimmer of glitter and neon and fairy dust.

Temple was wearing her solid Austrian crystal pumps with a black cat on the heels with a silver knit two-piece suit. Kit was electric in a teal satin dressy suit.

Temple choked when she saw them sitting at the table, eyeing the Strip, Dad in a navy sport coat, Mom in a lightweight blazer.

“Just think American Gothic,” Kit whispered, tightening her grip on Temple’s hand.

Temple had to laugh. She hadn’t seen her parents since leaving Minneapolis with Max to come to Las Vegas more than two years ago. She’d left under a blue-black cloud of parental skepticism and dismay, but she was almost nine years past twenty-one and had the right to follow her heart.

They surprised the Barrs, who turned to see them standing there, smiling, thanks to Kit’s little joke.

Karen gave a little cry and stood up to hug Temple. “Your hair! It’s. . . faded. But otherwise, of course, you look wonderful.”

“A cosmetological accident,” Temple murmured, not mentioning she liked the lighter strawberry blond-red so much she might keep it. An engaged woman had a right to change her hair color.

Her dad gave her the awkward fatherly hug perfected in the Midwest for occasions from weddings to funerals. Next it was Kit’s turn to be embraced by Karen and shake hands with Roger.

“This is a fairly subdued hotel,” Karen said after they’d all seated themselves again. First, Temple and Kit insisted the Barrs keep their seats facing the view. They’d been set on giving them up. “For Las Vegas.”

“It’s a client of mine,” Temple said.

Her mother was gazing at the padded closed menu as if it needed dusting. “That’s nice, dear. Roger, I hope you brought your bifocals, this menu is as thick as a phone book.”

“I know what I want,” he said, pushing the glasses in question up his nose. “I always get a New York strip steak and a baked potato.”

Kit and Temple exchanged agonized teenage glances. Too bad they were both so far past the teen years.

Temple eyed her mother. She wore a figured silk blouse and rose slacks under the beige blazer. Her father wore a sport coat and long-sleeve shirt, no tie. Their clothes were perfectly suitable for a fine restaurant in casual Las Vegas.

Why, then, did they look so stuffed shirt?

“I see,” Temple’s mother said, “you’ve opted for going barelegged.”

“It’s always hot here, outside at least, and I hate pantyhose. And this is a desert climate. . . .” Templelet her apologia trickle off.

“Me too,” Kit said. Karen eyed her over the menu. “I never wear hose in Las Vegas. This is the West.”

“But in Manhattan,” Karen began.

“Oh, in Manhattan. Yes, of course. All the time. Sliding into the hot, broken-down cab seats, out of the hot, broken-down cab seats; panty hose, every second. Racing crosstown on the crowded sidewalks, all of us women in panty hose. Every minute.”

“You chose to live there,” Karen said. “What is this cerviche stuff?”

“Spanish,” Temple said hastily. “Undercooked and overex-pensive. Not that we have to worry. Our meal is on the house.” She didn’t add that it was raw fish in lime or lemon juice. Min-nesotans didn’t eat anything but vegetables raw.

Her father frowned over his glasses frames. “We’re perfectly capable of paying.”

“I have a permanent free pass to all the Phoenix’s restaurants.”

“Food is very cheap here, Roger,” Karen explained. “They practically give it away.”

Temple took a deep, deep breath. Not these high-end days. A dinner for four here could run close to three hundred dollars. If they had cocktails and wine with the meal, it would be more. Temple desperately wanted cocktails and wine with the meal.

She met Kit’s eyes as the waiter breezed by with a question. “Cocktails?”

“A green apple martini for me,” Kit said smartly. “Temple will have one too. Karen? Roger?”

“Do you have beer?” Roger asked.

“A hundred and forty varieties, sir. What would be your pleasure?”

“Schlitz would be fine.”

The waiter was momentarily tongue-tied.

“Anything Scandinavian,” Temple offered.

“Certainly,” the waiter said.

“I’ll have a daiquiri,” Karen said.

The waiter blanched and asked, “And wine for dinner?”

“A nice Chablis,” Roger said decidedly.

“Very good, sir,” the waiter boomed, as if just asked to deliver a jeroboam of champagne.

Roger beamed. “Nice fella.”

“This is a hospitality industry,” Temple said cheerily.

“Are you eating enough?” her mother asked. “You’re not drinking too much?”

“Green apple martinis are a health food,” Kit said. “No nasty salty olives or onions, just fresh Granny Smith apples and a touch of vermouth.”

And a few jiggers of gin.

“They do have a strip steak,” Karen told Roger encouragingly. Then she smiled at Temple. “I’m glad we managed to come for Kit’s wedding. It’s so good to see you. You haven’t been managing any visits home.”

“It’s been so busy—” she began, sounding lame even to herself. Her mother certainly wouldn’t want news of Max Kin-sella. Even if it was bad, which it was, as there was still no news of Max Kinsella. Which would be good news to Karen Barr, so Temple was going to be very vague about how and when Max split, and they split up.

“I can’t believe it,” Karen went on, eyeing Kit. “You, getting married! After all this time single. And you had to leave that miserable New York City madness and come to Las Vegas to visit Temple to find Mr. Right. Is he . . . retired here? I understand a lot of people do that.”

Aldo? Retired? Temple was glad her martini had arrived and she could take a tart sip and cough slightly. Only in a circular water bed.

“No,” Kit said. “He’s in business with his brothers.” She sipped, savored, and added, “One of whom owns this hotel-casino.”

Minnesota eyebrows raised in tandem.

“The Fontanas are an old Las Vegas Family,” Kit added demurely.

Roger folded away his reading glasses. “How ‘old’ can a Las Vegas family be,” he joked. “They didn’t start up the place until the 1940s.”

“If that’s when you arrived here, then you’re an old Las Vegas family,” Temple explained. “They also call this end of the country the ‘New West.’ It’s all spin.”

“Is it exciting,” Karen wanted to know from Temple, “to be doing public relations work in a tourist destination like Las Vegas?”

“Oh, yes. Sometimes too exciting.”

“And cultural too,” Kit said. “Temple handled the opening of the Treasures of the Czars exhibition here just last month. Fabulous Imperial artifacts and stacks of uplifting, interesting information about the new order in modern-day Russia.”

“And, then,” Temple added, “I do PR for a lot of conventions that come to town. My most recent was for the Red Hat Sisterhood. They’re—”

“I know who they are,” Karen said excitedly. “Some of my friends belong and have been trying to talk me into joining, since Roger’s retired and you’re gone and your brothers are all busy with young, growing families.”

Temple counted two possible digs: her moving away and her not producing children. Her brothers were in their forties, as Temple had been either an accident or an afterthought, and coming from a family with five kids, they had gone forth and had three each, defying statistics of the times. Not that her brothers had done the actual having, which made it a lot easier to do.

Karen was watching Temple closely, no doubt with Max in mind.

Luckily, the waiter buzzed by, recited the evening’s specials, and they spent the next ten minutes oohing and ordering.

“Won’t tournedos of beef be a little rich for your stomach?” Karen asked Roger in an undertone once the waiter had left.

Temple was proud of him for venturing beyond the usual New York strip steak.

“That’s what seltzers are made for,” he answered. The red-gold beer in the iced glass must be mellowing him. “When is your fiancé joining us?” he asked Kit.

She lifted her small evening bag from the tabletop. “As soon as I call him on my cell phone. I wanted us to have some time to relax and chat first.”

“Kit,” Karen said, “we won’t bite. I’m just so tickled you finally found the right man.”

Kit tried not to squirm. Temple knew that her getting married had just happened. It wasn’t a lifelong search. Aldo was there, feeling a bit burned out after the loss of his longtime girlfriend, and along came Kit, full of postmenopausal zest and a tad of hormone replacements.

“Oh, now isn’t this something?” Roger asked as the waiter lofted the appetizer tray Temple had ordered for them to share. One of the four delicacies was fried in batter, which she knew her dad would go for.

He grinned at the women and, after a glance at the many plates and pieces of silverware, moved half the batter-fried items to his plate.

Kit flashed Temple a happy smile. Papa had his beer and batter and would be cool from now on in. Mama, on the other hand . . .

“That looks fatty,” Karen said.

“They only use olive oil here,” Temple said. “That’s the kind that’s good for your heart.”

“Oh? I thought that cheap food was oilier in general.”

Temple was glad they’d never see the bill. Her mother was thinking of the days of cheap three-dollar buffets laden with sugary, greasy comfort food, back in the unenlightened eighties. Las Vegas was a class, and costly, act these days. Sure, there were always economical fast-food places in every Strip hotel, but even those menus were healthier and more palatable.

Temple sipped her sweetly tart martini, feeling a little mellow herself.

“So,” said Karen to Kit, sipping her daiquiri, a vintage cocktail with a funny little hazelnut bobbling in it, “how did you meet this Aldo?”

“Through Temple,” Kit said brightly. “She introduced us.”

“Oh, that’s nice, dear. Meeting through family is always best.”

“Yeah,” said Kit, thinking, no doubt, of the whole, big, slightly mobbish Fontana family, from Uncle Macho Mario on down to Nicky.

Speaking of which, at that moment Temple was surprised to see Nicky and Van stroll over, a very handsome couple blending dark and light looks.

“Everything all right here, folks?” Nicky asked, his bright white teeth flashing against his smooth olive skin.

Van, always the elegant Hitchcock blonde, merely smiled.

After introductions, Roger took the beef tournedos by the horns. “So it’s your brother that’s stolen our Kit away.”

“My eldest brother,” Nicky said, grinning.

“You must be just a baby,” Karen suggested.

“The youngest, yes.”

“Your mother must be quite an interesting woman.”

Temple could see her mother calculating thirty years of childbearing. If she only knew how many brothers there were, she’d be really impressed. Unlike Mama Fontana, Karen had ended her streak of four sons with a lone girl. That family position left Temple cosseted and fussed over and bullied and controlled way too much.

It was nice to be from Las Vegas now, on her own, making her solo choices. One of which . . .

“Is Matt coming along for dinner too?” Nicky asked, turning to Temple as if giving her a cue.

He didn’t mean it that way, but it gave Temple the perfect opening. She looked at her parents in explanation. “I have a significant other coming to dinner too. Matt Devine is a local celebrity. He hosts a syndicated radio advice show.”

There!

Karen dropped her fork, which had been attacking the remaining battered items that she’d appropriated to her appetizer plate. She might inveigh against fatty foods, but a Minnesota blizzard-ridden winter made them a number-one crave. “Matt, not Max?”

“Max has left Las Vegas.”

Karen just stared.

“They drifted apart,” Kit said, “and Matt drifted into view. Quite a nice view he is too. Shall I call the boys now?” She pulled her cell phone from her purse as Nicky and Van eased away.

“Boys?” Karen said weakly, still numbed by the fact that Temple as well as Kit was producing a new beau.

Kit dialed. “Hi, handsome. Yeah, you can steer your Italian tailoring up to the restaurant. The waiter knows you’ll be ordering a bit late.”

Karen’s jaw was again agape. She glanced to Temple, then at the two empty place settings. Two, not one. Her jaw moved as if she was going to speak. But her first question would have been about Max, and even Karen Barr knew that would be a fatal move.

She sipped her daiquiri. “This is very good. I haven’t had one in years.”

“Then have another,” Kit urged. “You don’t often meet a new prospective s on-in-law and brother-in-law on the same day.”

“Temple?” Karen gazed accusingly at Temple’s ringless left hand, and then Kit’s.

“We’re letting the gentlemen install our engagement rings again tonight,” Kit said, “for your viewing pleasure. We’re very sorry about surprising you with two engagements, but we thought it would be better to do in person instead of over the phone.”

“But we haven’t met this Matt person,” Karen said.

“That’ll be taken care of tonight,” Kit answered. “Don’t worry. He’s a matinee idol dreamboat. Smart and rich too. What mother wouldn’t be over the moon about it?”

“Has he been married before?” Karen asked. “After a certain age, it’s hard to find . . . uh . . . ”

“Non-preowned models?” Temple asked. “Nope. Never married.”

“And he’s how old?”

“Thirty-four.”

“Never-married men that age can be . . . difficult.”

“Nope,” Temple answered. “See for yourself.”

“He makes all this money from just talking on the radio?” her dad asked.

“Think Garrison Keillor,” Temple said, “but cute.”

She wanted to avoid the ex-priest part until her parents had gotten used to the idea of an Unknown Quantity in Temple’s life. Max had not been welcomed, but at least they’d met him.

Kit had been playing lookout while Temple fended off her parents’ questions and now she grabbed Temple’s hand. “Here they come, our Greek gods.”

The attractive hostess strutted across the floor with the guys in tow, the tall and dark Aldo in his usual yummy pastel silken Italian suit, shirt, and tie; Matt wearing less formal clothes, but relaxed and pale for the climate, enhancing his blond good looks.

Barr Pere and Mére were satisfyingly speechless as Temple and Kit stood for the greeting pecks on the cheek . . . as the men were introduced and took their seats . . . as the waiter breezed by to take the newcomers’ drink orders. Then they spoke.

“I’ll have another daiquiri,” said Karen.

“Very good.”

“And I’ll—” Roger gazed at his empty beer glass. “I’ll have a scotch on the rocks.”

Kit and Temple crossed glances. Yes!

After the drinks had been delivered and the new entree orders had been taken, the sixsome was alone at the table and the conversational ice was as solid as on Lake Minnehaha in mid-January.

“I guess we should toast the happy couples,” Roger said finally, looking eagerly at his lowball glass gleaming gold with Johnnie Walker.

“First,” Aldo said with a smile, “we must repeat the ring ceremony for our honored guests.” He flourished a velvet box from his side jacket pocket. Matt’s was produced from his inside jacket pocket, on the heart side, a detail Temple didn’t miss.

The small boxes opened, dispensing major glitz. Rings slipped onto fingers they had previously fit like a dream.

Roger raised his glass and everyone followed suit, Karen last. “To our loved ones, and their loved ones.”

It was a darn good toast. Temple stared at her father. He winked. “Drink up, Karen, you don’t want to miss the Love Boat.”

And then the chatter started. Man-to-man. Woman-to-woman. Cross-gender, cross-table. Aldo, incredibly, knew about broomball, that skating-rink sport Roger got a kick out of. Hockey with brooms. Aldo said bocci ball was a lot like it. Temple doubted it, but gave him high marks for creativity.

Matt explained Temple’s important public relations coups to her mother, without mentioning any stray murder-solving or neck-risking. Karen became fascinated by the people and issues that surfaced on Matt’s “Midnight Hour” counseling program and his Chicago appearances on The Amanda Show. She watched that program, liked Amanda better than Oprah, who was getting to be “too much Oprah everywhere all the time.” She wanted Matt to e-mail her when his next appearance was coming up.

E-mail? Her mother?

“We’ve got a phone-Internet-TV setup now,” Karen told Temple when she spied her daughter’s amazement. “Roger is going to set me up with an e-mail identity and a Web page.”

They asked Matt about his own parents.

They lived, he said, in Chicago, not mentioning that it was separately and had been that way forever.

Chicago! Great city. Just four hundred miles from the Twin Cities. Where would Kit and Aldo be living?

Las Vegas and Manhattan. No way was Kit giving up her Greenwich Village redone condo. It was a very profitable investment. She was still writing a new novel now, but the industry wasn’t what it used to be and she was considering herself not so much semiretired as having a long ongoing narrative to write with Aldo. A trip to his native Italy, maybe some cruises. They’d both worked hard and it was time to enjoy leisure time.

“We should take a cruise,” Karen told Roger, resting her hand on his.

“We could go together,” Aldo said. “For a honeymoon, a second honeymoon for you two. Temple and Matt could come.”

Karen looked hopefully at Temple. She hadn’t seen much of her daughter for more than a year, and maybe now she realized that it was her fault for being so negative about Max.

Temple felt her throat closing up again. She was happy this evening was going so well for everyone, but Max hadn’t deserved her parents’ disapproval. She’d never regret a moment with him. And if he was dead now, with no one to know where or to mourn him, she always would.

Matt put his hand over hers and leaned close. “We’ll do what we want about the wedding and honeymoon,” he assured her. “Your way.”

She just nodded, not trusting herself to speak quite yet. It was nice to bask in astounded parental approval, but she’d never disown her own past. And Matt would never expect her to, as he could never renounce his past either.

They sat quietly for a while, listening to the others talk and discover common ground, content to be by their unspoken selves. Just . . . content.

“My poor boy,” Garry Randolph murmured, lowering the week-old edition of the Review-Journal his Las Vegas contact had sent.

The social scene reporter, although a bit gushy, had written vividly enough to paint him into the entire scene, especially since he’d glimpsed some of the players. Well, her especially, Temple Barr. Max’s Temple Barr.

He slapped the paper against the small glass-topped table on his hotel balcony. The vast ripples of Alpine meadows beyond it were too magnificent and generous to absorb a fit of pique.

Still, Max was a son to him. He wanted to witness his wedding, a happy ending to all those unhappy years since Max’s cousin Sean had exploded from an IRA pub bomb.

Even if Max had been here now, Garry wasn’t sure whether he’d show him this news from what had been his most recent home. The boy’s body was compromised from the attempt to kill him even as he attempted to fake his death. His mind was . . . able, still quick and brilliant, but emptied of all its personal data, even the guilt of Sean’s death. That, at least, was a blessing. And his spirit was intact.

Garry grinned. And he could still disappear, like any good magician, as he’d learned from his mentor for both stage and spying purposes.

Damn! The magician once known as Gandolph the Great again slapped the folded paper to the glass tabletop as if trying to flatten a fly. Why had Max vanished, and that sleek lady psychiatrist with him?

Another attempt on his life in the Swiss clinic? Most likely. Why leave with her? Had she made the attempt and he’d taken her as hostage? But a man with his legs in casts was hardly able to take a hostage, even a female one. Even Max. Had she and her henchmen abducted Max? More likely.

Who would be her henchmen? Members of the rumored group of worldwide magicians, the Synth? Synthesis was an important concept in the kabbalah and ancient systems of magic and alchemy. Las Vegas had hosted a small, secret nest of Synth members, but—from what Max said when he infiltrated them in his own persona—they were petty plotters, more disgruntled unemployed magicians playing at conspiracy than any real force.

Or so Max had concluded. Had he miscalculated? Certainly someone had arranged for him to hit a wall at high speed at the nightclub called Neon Nightmare, the very pyramid-shaped building in which the Las Vegas chapter of the Synth met.

Pyramid. Another link to ancient magic systems. Perhaps he, Gandolph, should take these theatrical villains much more seriously. He was tired of returning to his old European spy grounds as Garry Randolph, calling in debts and trying to lay to rest Max’s ghosts, Sean and their personal femme fatale, the psychotic IRA operative Kathleen O’Connor, now finally at rest in an unmarked grave in Las Vegas.

What was happening now could create new ghosts, perhaps for Garry Randolph himself.

So far he’d followed the tried-and-true paths. In Switzerland, Ireland, and Las Vegas. But with Max missing, Gandolph the Great was coming out of retirement, albeit secretly.

It would need more than spy work to quickly find and save Max this time.

It would require a bit of that old black magic that Gandolph knew so well.

Somehow, during the night, he’d managed to turn himself over from sleeping on his stomach to his back.

Pretty impressive for an invalid.

The morning sun was slanting through the drawn sheer curtains, slashing light across the golden birchwood floor, on the pristine white comforter.

His stomach rumbled, craving more food.

He stretched out an arm. He’d never sensed her again in the night, not after the massage that had put him out cold. No, out warm. No dreams. No nightmares.

His hand sunk into a foot of airy feathers, nothing more.

He pushed up on his elbows, giving his leaden legs a bit more rest.

Nothing there. He was alone in the room.

Alarm racing down his limbs.

Wait. It was morning. She was waiting her turn at the bathroom, or already in it. In fact, his bladder was burning. He’d slept too hard to use the chamber pot under the bed. But he sure needed relief now.

He’d have to—unnh—spin and get his feet to the floor. There was the cane. Put his weight on it, stand. Shake a little. He’d go to the hall bath in his shorts. If he met anyone, tough. No point shrugging into the jeans again until he was ready to go out in them. His legs were stiff from being unused all night. He walked like Frankenstein’s monster, as if the casts were still on them.

But his joints were loosening by the time he got to the door.

Peeking out into the hall, he saw it was deserted. She must be in the bath then.

His steps and the clunk of the cane sounded like The Return of the Mummy. He swung his legs stiffly ahead one by one. The knees would take a while relearning to bend.

There was no splashing sound beyond the old wooden door, so he exercised his knuckles and knocked. Maybe he could talk her into a morning massage. It had really helped him sleep.

No answer.

He tried the knob, which gave. The bathroom was empty. He pushed himself inside, looked it over hard. Not even one vagrant blond hair in the sink from washing her hair last night. Some Swiss neat freak had freshened up the place for the day already.

Whoever he was had been a sensible guy. He took a leak while here, hand-brushed his dark hair, then clumped down the hall, pushed his tender legs into the jeans. He noted that her backpack was gone, packed his own, took a look around to make sure nothing was left behind, and went downstairs to the “expanded Continental” breakfast room. That would mean muesli as well as bread, fruit, coffee, and tea.

A German couple with a teenage daughter were chewing their cuds at one table. The buffet offerings looked picked over. Max finally thought to glance at the cheap watch with a cuckoo clock on the dial he’d bought on their first nicked credit card spree last night.

Eleven! In the morning?

Where the hell was she? Out on the town? It boasted a square the size of King Kong’s handkerchief, a fountain, some quaint shops, and that was it.

His heart was pounding. He lurched through the pocket lobby and into the streets. Still narrow, hilly, mostly empty, leading to the square where the tourist buses stopped on their overland way from Italy to France. This village was a remote way station between twelve-thousand-foot peaks.

Why would she leave? Now? She was just softening him up, damn it.

Or . . . she had been taken.

His crutch.

Someone had caught up with them, wanted him on his own, more vulnerable.

Or, she had joined someone who’d always followed them, now watching him from a distance, waiting to see what he did, where he went, when he was alone again.

It didn’t make sense, either scenario, with Revienne cast as either villain or victim.

He knew what he had to do: keep moving, keep supplying himself with stolen and soon-ditched credit cards, get to a large city. Find some way to arm himself with more than a hokey carved cane, although no ideal weapon came to mind.

“Max” had been facing a lot worse for half a lifetime from what Garry Randolph had said. And his legs were really pretty good, considering. Too bad there wasn’t a tiny bit of level ground in this whole damn handkerchief country . . . !

He recognized the fear underneath his anger at this sudden change in circumstances, this desertion. That he didn’t know who he was or where he could go and he didn’t dare tell anyone that, because then he’d be revealed as vulnerable and enemies could come circling like mad dogs.

Around him the life of the square bustled on. The shriek of the huge buses’ brakes, the rush of babbling tourists in and out of shops, the tinkling fountain, all the ordinary sounds scraped his nerves raw.

No one noticed him. As far as he could tell.

He felt like a kid lost in a department store. Mommy!

Ridiculous! He didn’t need a keeper, or an anchor. It was time he was truly on his own, then.

High time.

Maybe he’d retrieve his survival instincts by finding out what had happened to Revienne. Why would she have deserted him after hauling him so far, with so much effort? Maybe she hadn’t. Maybe she’d been snatched.

Maybe she was also a target. After all, she’d been interrogating him for days.

He started over the cobblestones, so quaint and damnably uneven, leaning as little as possible on his cane. A truly lame man stood out. A tourist enamored by an Alpine souvenir didn’t.

He’d start in the shop where they’d bought the new clothes. He’d have to concoct a likely story for his inquiries.

His wife had left the inn to get some extra film for the camera. Wait. No. Everything was digital these days. Some . . . sunscreen for the thin mountain air. Blond, you remember? Very sensitive to sunburn. Had anyone seen her this morning? His beautiful blond wife.

The description felt alien, but a magician was an actor at heart. He could sell any illusion.

His beautiful blond wife.

Like his sanitarium patient name, Michael “Max” Randolph, that just didn’t feel right. Not the blond part. Not the wife part.

From his unease in the role, he gathered he wasn’t the marrying kind.