“This Shangri-La,” Alch mused as he spiraled the car out of the shadowy hotel parking ramp into the sunlight glare of jammed near-Strip traffic. “I hear she snookered you once.”
“We talking pool?”
“I’m talking sweet-talking you out of the audience and onto the stage, where she relieved you of a valuable ring. Some magic trick. The lieutenant happened to be there.”
“I remember. But the police couldn’t find any way to charge Shangri-La with anything, ring snatching or drug smuggling. So, now that she’s dead months later, I’m a suspect?”
Alch chuckled like a befuddled uncle. “Maybe. If you really liked that ring, and what’s not to like about a Tiffany ring from your best beau?”
Temple could see why Alch pulled escort duty to the presumed bereaved so often. She appreciated the quaint old-fashioned way he phrased her romantic situation while pointing out her potential for revenge for her traumatic past encounter with Shangri-La.
“No, you’re not a suspect,” he reassured her. “Not to me.” And panicked her. “I’m just saying you had opportunity to study her close-up in her stage costume. And if you saw her bare faced—”
“I did. I was shocked. I’d assumed, as you had, that she showed her face to no one.”
“Musta caught her off guard. You think that ring thing had any hidden personal meaning?”
“No. She just wanted a distraction for her stage trick.”
Alch made a face that was half frown and half pout. On him, it looked good. “We found no evidence at all that she was involved in the kidnapping that followed. So. Innocent bystander, huh? Not so lucky last night.”
“None of us was lucky last night, Detective.”
“ ‘CC’ was. Cute how they abbreviate ‘Cloaked Conjuror.’ Guess it must be a pain to refer to him daily by such a klutzy pseudonym. I can’t get over all these anonymous magicians around town now. Like that new guy at Neon Nightmare, the Phantom Mage. Does all that new-fangled bungee work too. Used to be that breed kept their feet on the ground and lived for the limelight. Like Siegfried and Roy, bless their hearts, or this Mystifying Max my boss has on her hit list.”
Temple didn’t know how to reply to this comment, so she didn’t say anything. Avuncular Morrie Alch might seem as comfy as chocolate chip cookies with milk, but he was a detective with a disarming Columbo-like way of seriously nosing around.
Temple yawned. “I’m sorry.”
“Must have been up pacing all night,” Alch said with a quick glance. “Trying to figure out how to get this hot tamale out of the fire. I notice the hotel press release refers to an ‘accident.’ ”
“I didn’t write it. Randy Wordsworth did. But isn’t that the best public conclusion for now? The stage machinery was defective but nobody fell without a mighty effort to prevent it.”
“Then you’re of the school that the guy in black was trying to save Shangri-La, not torpedo her.”
“Is there any other school among the witnesses?”
Alch concentrated on easing them into a parking spot outside the coroner’s low-profile facility on Pinto Lane. “Not among the witnesses, no.”
Temple knew that he was referring to Molina and her grudge match with Max.
Pinto Lane was a two-block street north of busy Charleston Boulevard and south of Alta Drive, where Our Lady of Las Vegas Church Convent School could keep an eye on the quick and the dead at the Clark County Coroner’s office. Like most public buildings in Las Vegas, this one was pale, bland, and entirely overlookable, if that was a word.
The lobby resembled the waiting room for a dentist’s office.
Alch ambled up to the reception window, flashed his shield, murmured a little, then beckoned Temple to a plain wood door.
A buzzer belched it open. They passed into a nondescript hall. A nose-tickling odor of oranges grew stronger but vanished as Temple was led through another door into a cubicle. The process reminded her of nothing so much as getting a mammogram, except for the male escort. And in fact she’d had her first one recently at the University Medical Center just two blocks away. Turn thirty and all sorts of strange and serious things come at you face first.
There had been a full-length curtain on that cubicle door. Here, they faced a shorter curtain on the opposite wall. Temple was reminded of a motel window with the drapes drawn.
“You know what to expect?” Alch asked, a hand on the drapery pulls.
“She’ll look like she’s ‘sleeping.’ ”
“No, young lady. I well know the temptation to get smart in the face of something unpleasant. She will look like she’s dead. You need to compare the pallor and stillness you see here with the healthy and mobile face you saw a few days ago. There will be changes but not significant ones.”
Temple swallowed, remembering that Matt had performed this very unpleasant service for his dead stepfather. How domestically bizarre and living-roomish it was to open the chintzy, short drapes just to see a draped gurney with only a dead head revealed.
How weird to see a person lying down never to get up again. How bizarre to imagine that graveyard-pale, makeup-masked Shangri-La persona as still as death.
“They washed off the makeup, of course,” Alch added.
Who was “they”? Temple wondered, bracing herself. Barefaced. Temple recalled the taut, angry, raw features she’d glimpsed on the exhibition floor when she was too surprised to realize that it was Shangri-La until the woman had moved on.
“How tall was she?” Temple asked.
A rustle as Alch consulted his lined notebook. “Five four.”
Temple nodded. Her impression exactly and height was always a prime issue with a shorty like herself. She knew where the top of her head hit on Max, for example, in heels and out of them, and now, on Matt. What a fickle girl! She deserved this moment of penance and repentance, only she didn’t believe in all that breast-beating stuff. Did she?
You don’t gaze on a dead person everyday. In funeral parlors they’re tarted up for the afterlife. Here, it was the naked and the dead and no escaping that reality in the comforting rituals of church and state and custom.
“Ready?” Alch didn’t sound ready himself.
Temple nodded.
The curtains hissed open on their rods like hula-dancing snakes. The sheet was so white it made the body’s skin tone look dingy, like yellow-gray laundry. In a way, Temple felt she was viewing a gray-and-white movie still. She saw mostly profile, but there was no denying the small, stubby nose, the large flat cheekbones, the jet black eyes. Nothing could return the taut muscular facial animation that had made all these features bold and vibrant and rather scary.
“That’s her.”
“Sure?” Alch’s forehead had creased like a raised miniblind, all furrows. Must be from working for Molina.
Temple nodded. “The animation’s gone, of course, but the features were quite striking. Unforgettable. And, we were a similar height, I saw them close-up. Do you have any idea yet who she really was?”
“We know exactly who she was.” Alch came to stand beside her. “Fingerprints. Ran them internationally.”
“Internationally?”
He shrugged. “Her Asian origin, the fact that the exhibition has a Russian connection. You never know what will turn up.”
“And?” A minuscule part of Temple’s reptile brain, the sheer primitive instinct part, still wasn’t sure this wasn’t Kitty the Cutter with plastic surgery and a spirit-gum extreme makeover.
“This little lady was on an international wanted list.”
Kitty? My God. Maybe she’d had plastic surgery years ago when she was on the run from both Interpol and the IRA, like Max. He’d just popped in some green contact lenses and disappeared into a bold performing persona. Maybe Kitty had remade her face and created a veiled persona. But wait! Matt was the only one to see her face-to-face as Kathleen O’Connor, and she’d been a black Irish beauty then. How could she—?