“You understand,” Molina asked, “that there is one and only one likely suspect for aerial deaths in this town?”
“You said you’d give Max a free pass if I masqueraded as a teenybopper on that reality TV show to protect your daughter. I kept my part of the bargain. Just look at my hair!”
“I don’t have to.” Molina kept her eye on the slightly twirling corpse not-so-high above. The crime scene technicians had reached it and were carefully freeing the lines from which it was suspended. “All of the men in this room are doing it for me. Men can be so shallow, as we know, and your girlish, gilded head is a distraction, so . . . out.”
“Why would Max have anything to do with this dead body?”
“Because it’s there?”
“That’s not fair. You promised.”
Molina smiled. Like a shark.
Temple froze again, this time to hear herself sounding just like the lieutenant’s whining teenage daughter, Mariah.
“Mother” Molina had one last bombshell to lay down. She wasn’t smiling now.
“I promised that I’d lay off going after your elusive significant other if he didn’t flip a smoking gun in my face. I think he just may have. All bets are off. This is Las Vegas, after all, and the odds on anything can turn in the wink of an eye.”
It was some comfort to Temple that Randy insisted she be present when Molina held an informal convocation with the New Millennium management an hour and a half later.
By then, the body had been removed. The police presence had retreated to a pair of buff young uniformed officers guarding the entrance to the exhibition. In their khaki shorts they looked rather like Boy Scout docents. Temple was thinking that she and the hotel could live with that if they were stationed there throughout the exhibition.
Besides, they were eyeing her with great interest. Apparently, she now could wrap men around her finger as easily as she could curl a strand of her blatantly faux blond hair around it.
This realization was sobering. Jessica Simpson knew something, although it wasn’t Chicken of the Sea tuna fish. Even Midnight Louie would never get confused about whether fish were chicken. In fact, he probably had a higher IQ than Jessica Simpson, but alas, he wasn’t blond.
Temple realized that she was going beyond the bend, but Molina and hotel executives negotiating when and how a crime scene could become a public attraction again were too bloody boring to bear.
Siamese If You Don’t
Please
Unfortunately, they rush the body out before I can do some shamus-class sniffing around on the scene.
I do not dare show myself anyway, but lurk up in the blacked-out flies. This is a sky-high hodgepodge of catwalks and ledges trimmed with deceptive mirrors and electrical wires and bungee cords, where all the magic show equipment lies in wait for the unwary. Or the gullible observer below.
Speaking of below, far down and away I spot the bright blond blot that is now my Miss Temple. It is sad how they tart up these showgirls for the ring nowadays. Yet I understand that she underwent this transformation for the Greater Good and the high purpose of rooting out a killer. Too bad she will have red roots for a number of months now.
I also watch Miss Lieutenant C. R. Molina prowl the scene like a big black leopard with bright blue eyes. She is a manhunter, that one. Not for her personal use, of course, but in the name of crime and punishment, which would be admirable if she were not hassling my Miss Temple at the moment.
I must lay low (in this case, high) and take it without defending MMT, but I growl out a low grumble of frustration.
It is answered by a bewitching merrrrow? of respectful interrogation.
I turn to find that a parchment-pale frail has pussyfooted out onto the long lean line of ledge on which I perch. Precariously.
Every muscle in my body tenses! Yes, every one. I have not glimpsed hide nor hair nor polished nail of the feline fatale attached to the magician known as Shangri-La for some weeks, even months.
Yet I know that hip-swinging long lean stride, so like a highfashion model on a catwalk. I know those blazing blue eyes. Rather like Miss Lieutenant Molina’s human version (only with a feline pupil as impetuously vertical as an exclamation mark). I know that gray mask and gloves and hose. And tail.
She is pretty poison, Miss Shangri-La’s performing partner from the storied land of Siam, now Thailand, who goes by the name of Hyacinth. Yet I am glad to see her again. Curare-painted nails and all. She stops to sit about two feet away, then curls her sinewy train around her gray-booted tootsies. I love boots on ladies!
You would never guess we were both balancing on a high-wire line sixty feet above a floor thronged with cops and major hotel executives.
She purrs. “They have taken our twirly toy away. I see you miss it.”
That is my Hyacinth. Heart of steel.
“I miss getting a good look and sniff around,” I say.
“You do not like to play with your food?”
“I am all work and no play, missy. I am a professional.”
“Performer?”
“Detective. You do remember me?”
“Oh! A shamus. You do not look Irish.”
“I am not! I am all-American, unlike you, lady. And we have met before.”
“Not to my knowledge. And I may be happy about that, if you are going to be so rude.”
“Look here, Hyacinth—”
“I am not Hyacinth. My name is . . .” Here she sighs. Pauses. Paws the adjacent ledge as if burying something stinky. “Squeaker.”
I am knocked speechless. Not only is this dame a double for the deliciously evil Hyacinth, down to her undercoat, but she has a moniker I would expect to find on a cat toy at Petco.
“Squeaker?” I repeat.
“I am told by my trainer that I was adopted from the shelter because I was a dead ringer for the commercially viable Hyacinth. But I was named because I had a”—another sigh—“ ‘screen door’ mew.”
“Screen door? What is that?”
“I do not know. Only that it has scarred me for life. At least my shelter name was feminine, Fontana.”
I do a drop back and ticker-clutch pose to convey my shock. I know ten cool cats named Fontana, and not one is a feline. But the little doll is still airing her grievances in the human nomenclature game, and I cannot blame her.
“Do I look like a ‘Squeaker’ to you?” she is demanding.
I do some heavy little-doll-aimed back-peddling. “Nope. You could be a . . . Cleo, or a . . . Sirena . . . or even a Britney, but not a Squeaker. No way.”
She sniffs. Mollified. Maybe she is Irish. “And you are—?”
“Midnight Louie. Dude about town. Private investigator. At your service.”
“Well, you go get that twirly toy back. I am so bored up here.”
“Not possible. The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police have taken it home to take apart. They are very possessive, trust me. So, why are you up here?”
“I am to become part of the act, but only as a body double for my adopted sister Hyacinth. I did not want to do it but you know Hyacinth.”
“Not as well as I would like to. Sorry, Squeaker, but Hyacinth is hot.”
“And I am not? We are identical twins. What is the difference?”
What can I say? Squeaker seems the nice, shy, domesticated sort.
Her stepsister Hyacinth would carve your heart out with a toxic toenail and eat it. She is irresistible. The male of the species is pretty stupid. Of any species. But somehow we survive.
“So what is your part in the upcoming show?” I ask.
And she tells me, sweet trusting soul that she is.
I am getting a sense of the high jinks that are going to unwind up here. The dude on the yo-yo string is just the beginning. An unscheduled beginning. But I love getting in on the ground floor. So to speak. Or to Squeak. So I ankle over to my new partner in high crime and we talk further. Among other things.