Cat In A White Tie And Tails

Jon Winslow lifted his glass in Temple’s direction. “Good thinking. You must be wondering what kind of families live in Chicago. Mira thinks her own relatives are demanding and judgmental and my relatives are egocentric and snobbish.”

“That’s okay,” Temple said with a grin. “Matt and I are the opposite of all that … well, one at a time. I can’t say that I don’t get all crusading and judgmental sometimes, and that Matt doesn’t expect everybody to be the best that they can be.”

“Nobody’s perfect,” Matt said, “but gossip is the new hard news.”

“I’m sure your mother would never want anybody—her, me, you, or the pixie PR woman here—to do anything to jeopardize your future. I’m sure everything she did in the god-awful situation I left her in was meant for your betterment.”

“Yes,” Matt agreed. “It was all meant for me.”

Temple bit her lip. Parents’ best intentions often go wrong. She was sure her parents didn’t intend their protectiveness toward their only daughter and youngest child to be smothering. Or that Matt’s mother’s cruelly driven quest for respectability would put her and her son in a domestic abuse lockdown. Or that Max’s parents and grieving aunt and uncle ever expected that having one dead and one surviving son would drive an unbridgeable wedge between everyone, forcing the victim, Max, out.

“My mother and I,” Matt told his father, “are facing some blowback from the past right now. There’s no way she could possibly settle her present dilemma without that being confronted and put to rest. That’s what Temple and I intend to do as soon as we can.”

Jon looked back and forth between them. “You’re that kind of a team already?”

They looked at each other and shrugged with a smile.

“I guess we are,” Temple said.

“So that’s the way things will have to stay for a while longer,” Matt said. “In suspended animation.”

“It’s killing my brother.” Jon frowned and then sighed. “He’s coming to me for advice. If we all sat down and you refereed—”

“No. Not yet.” Matt was firm. “You’re a heck of a nice guy and so, I bet, is your brother, or my mother would never have fallen for the both of you. I’d be proud to have a new father and uncle, but my mother isn’t ready for a ‘one big happy.’ And she’s the one who’s borne the burden of your mutual regard for her. “Don’t you get it?” Matt asked his father. “Thirty-five years is a nanosecond when it comes to the human heartbeat.”

Temple noticed that Jon had been looking more and more sheepish as Matt spoke, and now made his closing argument.

“Face it, Jon. She’s scared to death she’ll still feel something for you if you met again, under any circumstances. And I bet you are too.”

“Do you believe she does?”

Matt turned to Temple. “What do you think now that you’ve met the birth parents?”

“I haven’t met Philip,” she said, “so this is a half-boiled opinion.” Temple was not about to mention she was personally quite familiar with romantic tangles, popularly known as “triangles.”

“Mira needs to see you again,” she told Jon, “to see for herself that the past is buried, even if you aren’t.”

“Wise advice, Miss Barr,” Matt told her, his penetrating eyes reading hers. “Would you like to appear on my talk show?”

“Of course.” She smiled. “But I get a lifetime contract.”

Chapter 26

Lurking Lusty Laddies

“I may be off-duty,” Rafi told Max, “but this is my territory.”

The Oasis was Las Vegas’s answer to the Taj Mahal. In fact, the giant gazebo by the pool out back was a re-creation of the Taj Mahal.

The Oasis’s fabled towers shimmered like glitter-dusted alabaster in the daylight, and a giant pair of exotically painted elephants stood at attention, glittering palanquins on their distant backs, flashing polyurethane tusks long enough, and strong enough, to seat the Mormon Tabernacle Choir for a photo opportunity. One foot and two faux ivory tusks each were eternally raised in welcome, along with their one-story-long trunks. Those hiked painted toenails, if animated, could have flattened a Humvee.

The human curbside greeters up front were costumed as Sabu, the elephant boy, with sun-burnished to gleaming cinnamon skin, wearing only brocade turbans and harem pants.

What snagged Max’s attention though, were the almost seven-foot-tall giant-bellied harem eunuchs holding three-foot-long curved swords and guarding a horizontal freezer-size transparent Plexiglas treasure chest crammed with paper money. Turning his head, Max could inspect thousands of slices of the Great Inventor’s face, aka Benjamin Franklin, gracing hundred-dollar bills.

“What’s with the cash wishing well?” he asked Rafi.

“Mucho security headaches until Friday. It’s a prize for the week’s biggest slot machine winner. A million bucks.”

“The sidewalk and undercarriage are wired, right?”

“Right. And don’t ask too many questions or I’ll think you’re really here to knock it off. And I’d have to shoot you.”