Temple restrained a warning growl.
“I’m sorry, madame,” Max continued, not sounding it at all, “to intrude at such a time, but an enterprise like this needs a guiding hand”—her lethal nails curled harder into his fingers—“or at least a front man with international connections.” Max was suddenly all brisk business. “I’m in this country only a short while. I was interested in seeing the facilities, if you don’t object.”
“Not at all. But I’m afraid that the assets will be tied up for some time. Cyrus was not one to share his financial dealings.”
Max reclaimed his hand and stuck them both in his blazer pockets as he strolled around the vast, southwestern-style entry area.
“Quite an impressive layout. I understand from…Miss Barr that you have an equally impressive, ah, head shop, so to speak, here also?”
“How quaintly you put it.”
At that moment another woman entered the huge hall, moving more like its mistress than an employee.
Temple sensed Max’s immediate interest as Courtney Fisher, as tall and tan as the girl from Ipanema, came swaying into their charmed circle.
“Is there anything your guests need, Leonora?” Courtney asked. “Refreshments? I’ve finished copying all the computer files.”
Leonora lifted a languid wrist and opened her mouth to perform hostess duties, striking Temple as a trained animal warming up for a familiar act. She spared her the effort.
“I met Mr. Van Berkleo’s assistant on my earlier visit. Maxi, this is Courtney Fisher.”
“Charmed.” Max took her hand, bowing so low over it in a European fashion that his face gazed at the vee of her maize linen suit and any presumable décolletage anyone so slender might be expected to have.
That’s when Temple tumbled to the fact that Courtney probably had been a mistress here: Van Burkleo’s.
Max had sensed it instantly, in the way the two women prowled at just too much social distance around each other, like nervous tigers in a too-small-for-territoriality cage.
“I don’t care for anything, do you, darling?” Temple responded to the recent beverage offer.
Max hesitated just long enough to flatter both women. “No. We are here to see the animals.”
“Then you must start here, which is, oddly enough, the ending point.” Leonora’s strangely immobile face managed the tiniest moue. “For the animals as well as poor Cyrus.”
“You needn’t show us.” Max sounded amazingly sincere for someone who meant the opposite.
“It is nothing.” Leonora’s face grew smug. “Cyrus died among his beloved beasts. If he could still be here with them, I’m sure he would be. In fact, I’m having him cremated so he can remain with them. You would have no objection to agreeing to his eternal residence, Mr. Maximilian, if you purchase the ranch?”
“Ah…no. Of course not. Highly fitting.”
Highly freaky, Temple thought.
She heard Courtney Fisher jingle away behind them as they moved toward the den, aka the scene of the crime.
Leonora also jangled and glided away, but toward the lair in which Temple had met Cyrus Van Burkleo. She still wore the colors of the Serengeti Plain. Her widow’s sackcloth and ashes were spots and stripes. She resembled some Bob Mackie edition of a Camouflage Barbie doll, small golden trophies of animal likenesses surrounding her person like clanging temple bells.
Temple glanced at her new ring as she followed Max and Leonora into Van Burkleo’s office. It had the opal ring from New York beat by about fifty thou, but she wished she had that one back.
She remembered how the friendly clerk at the estate jewelry shop had blinked not an eyelash when Max had whipped out cash to pay for the ring. “This is the fastest and flashiest way to establish credibility,” he had whispered to Temple as they left with the ring on her finger. “Like it, darling?” he asked loudly on the threshold.
“Love it,” Temple confessed, just as loudly, with smarm, as they swept into the concourse crowded with people.
And she did. Not the ring so much as feeling like she was starring in a Noël Coward play. She was much too short to star in a Noël Coward play.
But that was then. This was now. Now she was reduced to a supporting role in an Agatha Christie play, as the pampered wife took command of the handsome stranger, leaving the feisty ingenue in the wings with one hell of a winking emerald ring. Temple was beginning to feel like a traffic semaphore, giving the green light to other people’s comings and goings.
She trailed the pair into the loathsome office, amusing herself by picturing Leonora’s clumsy face and feral eyes in the place of the noble visages that actually occupied the walls.
Not one, she noticed, was a leopard. Was that why the leopard in question had been brought into the house? To be stalked on its owner’s own home ground? She wouldn’t put anything past people who made a living from dead animals.
Anyone that could tolerate old, confused and semidomesticated animals to be gunned down from a few feet away by men who had paid ten or twenty thousand dollars a head for the privilege…well, such a person deserved to be represented for eternity by a headstone.
She had not seen the animal-rights protesters, so she couldn’t gauge their ability to kill in defense of taking life. She’d think not, but on the other hand, nothing enraged her as much as the deliberate death of the helpless: a child, a prisoner, an animal.
If someone threatened Midnight Louie in her sight…although it was usually the other way around: someone threatened her in Midnight Louie’s sight, and on a couple of occasions he had taken most effective action for a house cat.
Her imagination had sometimes magnified Midnight Louie to big-cat size and pictured him patrolling her fifteen-hundred-square-foot domain at the Circle Ritz, trolling for prey.
Eight hundred pounds of snarling feline fury.
Somehow she never imagined him snoozing on his back with all four paws splayed to the four corners of the room like the king of the beasts on his African savanna. Well, to the four corners of the earth. Actually, given the round shape of the Circle Ritz and the globe, none of that four corners stuff made sense. Who came up with those figures of speech? Mapmakers? A pope before Galileo, or long after him?
Galileo. Leo. How the English pronounced the name Leo in a Noël Coward play. Lay-oh. As in Lay-oh-nar-do Dee-Creep-io. Odd how many “leos” there were in this case. The leopard itself. Leonora. Leo the lion on Van Burkleo’s wall. Next thing she knew Leontyne Price would show up as a suspect. Or Noël (Leon backward!) Coward himself. No, he was dead.
All they needed now was a suspect named Ole, but that was a name you only ran into in Minnesota….
“Temple,” Max said for what sounded like the third time from the emphasis he put on it.
“Yes?” She had been mentally leo-gathering, she admitted to herself. Maybe because a female was always superfluous around Leonora, the prototypical predatory woman.
“Would you like to see the outdoor facilities? Leonora has kindly offered to guide us. And your emerald could use some fresh air.”
Any daydream to avoid facing the nightmare of dead animal heads on walls.
“Of course,” she said, waving her ring-bearing hand in a very Noël Coward leading-actress way.
Max came to take proprietary possession of the ring. Of her hand, that is, and they both beamed with nauseating expectancy at Leonora.
“I really don’t know why you’d care to take on a game operation in Las Vegas, Mr. Maximilian. It’s a low-profile enterprise, best suited to those with a passion for wildlife.”
“Oh, Maxi has a passion for wildlife,” Temple said, linking her arm possessively through his, “although he has a quite subtle dislike of the obvious.”
The woman’s leonine face lifted at the muzzle—upper lip to those used to human anatomy—at Temple’s implication. Temple thought she spied a sprinkling of hairs on that strangely elongated upper lip. At the least Leonora needed a good waxer, if not a wax museum.