Cat In A Sapphire Slipper

This was where male clients were put on hold while the logistics of the girl and the room and the fantasy were rotated on the madam’s office computer. Yes. Sex for sale was microman-aged these days.

Temple could imagine male clients eyeing each other warily.

What are you here for?

It felt very nineteenth century, and so did the ambience of the Sapphire Slipper.

Sex. The Final Frontier. Then and Now.

The office had flocked purple velvet wallpaper, a neat compromise between the blue theme of the whorehouse and the presumed red-blooded male vitality of the clients. A miasma of blue smoke haunted the intimate room.

Temple commandeered the rolltop oak desk and the rolling, golden oak, leather-upholstered desk chair, both big enough for Judge Roy Bean. She felt like Alice sitting on a mobile mushroom, but no need to tell anyone else. Her first task: to discover who were the usual denizens of the place, and who had been imported for this travesty of a bachelor party. Who was out of place, in one way or another? Besides the naked and the dead.

Sitting here, alone, Temple felt the despair Matt must have known on discovering the body. She could picture him chest-tapping and blowing into those still-warm lips, trying to coax life back into a frame it had only so recently deserted.

Matt, bent over a seminude woman, kissing her back to life.

She was proud of him. She might have been too squeamish to try to raise the dead with the pound, pound, pound of hands on chest and the pinched nostril Kiss of Life.

She knew he had given it his all. And so Nicky had found him.

Sad that trying to undo death made you look like a suspect.

Nicky Fontana had tremendous faith in her, enough to gamble his brothers’ lives and freedom on it. He counted on her to get him and his enterprise out of any hot water before the Las Vegas law’s zeal for arrests could boil over to scald clan Fontana.

This was a third-degree burn. Every male Fontana on the planet was front and center as a suspect, just for being here, especially Nicky, and even Aldo, Kit’s late-life love. Damn! Had someone meant to ruin Temple’s life and that of everyone she cared for? No. That was paranoid. This murder was a fluke intruding into the serene unwinding of her life and that of those she loved. And who loved her.

This murder was a hate crime. Sudden. Opportunistic, not caring about anyone she herself cared about. The motive was likely old. And ugly. And well concealed. Easy to assign to someone unconcerned and utterly innocent. So it was diabolical. Dangerous for the very randomness of the act.

Temple put her fist to her mouth and breathed a sigh on it. It was really pedal to the metal time.

No time for amateurs.

And no time.

She had to come up with a likely suspect before the police had to be called out here in a fistful of hours. Maybe ten.

Max would have known what to do here, where the Obvious intersected with the Devious. That’s what magic acts were all about: the outward motions seemed open and obvious, but deceptions lay behind every apparently simple move and motive.

Temple was surprised to be missing Max as much she was. Not as a bed partner—a neglected love life, no matter how electric once, couldn’t compete with a l ong-smoldering attraction suddenly cooking on all burners—but as a thinking partner.

Max had let her in on the mental gyrations of a counterspy. Taught her how to see beneath the illusions most people throw up around themselves in self-defense. Beneath the deceptions of people who truly mean to do other people ill.

A lot was on the line in Vegas’s legal brothels. Competition among women for customers, everybody’s—courtesan and client alike—sexual potency and self-esteem, the crass bottom line of giving or getting one’s money’s worth.

Max, being a professional deceiver onstage, was almost impossible to deceive.

Yet he was gone, too suddenly. Had he finally been deceived? Or was he finally finishing the ugly business that had put his life in danger, and had contributed to their drawing apart despite themselves?

Temple didn’t know. With Max, one never could.

And one could never count him out. He knew how to breathe life back into dead relationships. She missed him. Wouldn’t count him among her dead and gone yet.

How could she? He was perfect. Immortal.

Wasn’t he?

Dead of Night

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.