“What about Siegfried and Roy and their breeding program for rare white tigers?”
“I don’t know. Kirby’s more of a hard-liner now than when I worked with him before.”
“Maybe having a canned-hunt club for a neighbor has something to do with it.”
Max nodded, looking abstracted.
Temple amused herself by trying to dust off her diamonds using the soft inside of her knit top.
“You can take custody of this,” she said after a minute.
“You don’t like masquerading as the rich and famous?”
“And as the mugged? I don’t think so. Did you see how Leonora couldn’t take her eyes off of it? And that Rafi guy, when he first spotted it, the look he had.”
“What?”
“Angry. And hungry.”
“Interesting. What did you think of him?”
“I already told you.”
“As a woman.”
“As a woman. You mean if I met him in a singles club, which I wouldn’t because I don’t go there.”
“Glad to hear it.”
Temple thought back. “He must be forty…”
“Age is the first thing you notice about a man?”
“That’s the problem. I really wouldn’t have noticed him if you weren’t asking me to make observations. He’s one of those older guys—”
“Older? At forty. Remind me to not have any birthdays for the next few years.”
“He seems more like fifty, really. I get a sense he’s been through the mill, that he’s down and out and has been for a long time, but he used to be something once. There’s an air of authority. Granted, it comes out as arrogance, but there’s something unconscious about it. Oh, and my opinion as a woman, by which I assume you mean how sexy I find him: I don’t, because I’m not looking for sexy, at least not outside the neighborhood, but he has a certain appeal in a noir kind of way. He’s pretty good-looking, or would be if he didn’t look so dissolute. You think he and Leonora have a thing going?”
“Now, that’s an idea. Husband dies, he shows up.”
“Now I get to ask you what you thought of Leonora.”
“Why? Tit for tat?”
“I’ve seen her before and you haven’t.”
“Something to see, all right. What would possess a normal woman to systemically rearrange her face into something out of Cats!?”
“Fashion, I suppose. And a weird kind of tribute to her husband’s business? But what did you think of her, as a man?”
“She comes across as sexually predatory, but I sense no heart in it. It’s automatic. If anything, I’d suspect she’s frigid.”
“That eliminates a hot affair with Rafi.”
“She might be able to fake it to get what she wants.”
“Which is…was…hubby dead?”
“I charged in there like the Ugly American in Tunisia, ready to buy the place up from the get-go. And she was perfectly willing to entertain my offer. He’s dead. She sells, takes the money, and runs before the authorities close the whole shebang down.”
After a pause, Max glanced at Temple. “How do you read the perfect secretary?”
“Courtney? Oddly like Leonora. I mean, wearing all that gold big-game jewelry—They could be clones.”
“All big-game hunters’ women wear that stuff. You see it at big-game conventions. The men buy traps and guns, the women gold trophies in jewelry.”
“You’ve been at a big-game hunter’s convention?”
Max shrugged modestly. “In the performance of my duty. That’s why I recognize the charm bracelets.”
“Clones. But not in the face.” A rough patch of terrain jolted some new ideas into her head.
“You think in the bedroom?” Max sometimes read her mind.
“Well…Courtney did strike me as the mistress type. But I sense that she’s out in the cold, so what would she gain from killing Cyrus? Nothing, except a loss of position.”
“If that’s her only position.”
“There’s more than horizontal for mistresses?”
“There is if she’s got another agenda.”
“What? Max! Don’t gloat. What did I miss?”
“I don’t think you missed it, I just think you didn’t draw the proper conclusion.”
“Oooh! It’s the jewelry, right?”
He nodded.
“So what’s so special about ostentatious”—here she waggled her ring finger at him—“expensive baubles? Theirs are all animal-based designs. Heavy. Obviously eighteen-karat gold. Crude trophies when you think of the creatures that are killed by the men in their lives.” Temple thought and jolted and stared at Sahara-style sand.
“Wait. Courtney wore one piece that wasn’t clunky and ostentatious and representative of big game. That wiry pendant, really thin. Delicate.”
Max’s profile was grinning.
“That’s why you did that salaam over her hand with your nose in her cleavage!”
“She doesn’t have any cleavage. Believe me, I know.”
“Neither do I, but I don’t get those big-time bows. You were checking out the pendant.”
“And—?”
“And it didn’t look like anything, just some lines joined together.” Temple pictured the oddly subtle charm in question. Her mind suddenly inflated it from two inches square to two feet square.
“Max! It’s the…thingie drawn on the floor where Professor Jeff was killed. At the University of Nevada campus. The out-of-skew house shape a kid would draw. Courtney is with the Synth?”
“The Synth is apparently behind the CC’s leopard being kidnapped. Maybe she’s the reason it ended up at the Rancho Exotica.”
“And who is the reason the leopard ended up alone together with a dead Cyrus Van Burkleo?”
Max lifted his profile to the horizon, dreaming as he drove. Why not, there was nothing out here but rattlesnakes and cactus and ruts?
“Cyrus. It almost sounds like Osiris.”
“If a leopard could be Irish.”
Max winced. “Don’t remind me of that. The Synth seems fond of the arcane. Maybe there’s a cosmic balance in a leopard named Osiris being on the death scene of a man named Cyrus. A balance, do you think?”
“The Synth is against trophy hunting?”
“The Synth may do its own form of trophy hunting, but I suspect—what would you call a gang of rogue prestidigitators…a sleight of magicians?—would be protective of the big cats they have traditionally worked with. Maybe the Synth was killing two birds with one stone: stopping Van Burkleo, and inconveniencing the Cloaked Conjuror.”
“Then the Synth never meant to harm the leopard.”
“No. I think the Synth is strictly interested in interspecies mayhem. Interprofession actually.”
“It’s much more likely that the women in his life killed Van Burkleo. He wasn’t a rogue magician. He was just a greedy egoist.”
“Then whatever the Synth’s peripheral games, we’re back to the women in the case.”
They rode in silence for a while. Cyrus Van Burkleo, the big-game hunter, seemed to have met his match and ended up dead. Leopard Lady and Synth Woman.
“I can’t really understand the woman,” Max said.
“Leonora?”
“Yes. Unless I learn why she had turned herself into a plastic surgeon’s playground. Could a smooth PR woman weasel her surgeon’s name out of her?”
“Maybe. But it could be somebody out of the country. I wonder how many U.S. surgeons would be willing to do that to a human face?”
“With enough money,” Max said, “you’d be surprised.”
* * *
“Was it a good Agatha Christie foreplay?” Max asked with a grin as he dropped Temple off in the Circle Ritz parking lot.
She grimaced as she got out, reacting to both her ride on the jolting Jeep and his lame joke.
“It sure wasn’t a climax,” she said, “but it was a good A.G. moment: an isolated camp in the desert, a cast of privileged and power-hungry people, the roar of the beasts in the distance, killing outside and in—”
He took off with a wave, the emerald ring safe in his breast pocket. Temple slogged toward the building, wishing the old pool had a new hot tub. She’d have to mention that potential improvement to Electra.