“No. C’est la key. I’d like everyone involved in the exhibition convened there, this afternoon. May I order a round of hors d’oeuvres?”
“That would cost hundreds. If you deduct it from your contract.”
“Of course, but if I solve your murders, the same amount goes to me as a bonus.”
“A bonus? I’m sorry but the police solve murders.”
“Sometimes. Sometimes I do if I must. A clean slate would give this exhibition and show a new lease on . . . death.”
By then Randy had joined them. “What’s up, chief?”
“Your little Miss Barr. She’s making bail-out noises.”
“Not me wanting to bail out,” Temple said. “Me wanting to bail you guys out.”
“We could use a bail out,” Randy said. “I advise we listen.”
“Your job is at risk.”
Randy visibly braced himself. “Could things get any worse? I say we go along to get along.”
“Crudités,” Wayans snarled.
“A large happy carrot stick to you too,” Temple said.
She couldn’t help being upbeat, although Randy winced as Wayans stalked (get it, celery!) away.
“He’s the big man, Tee. Our futures are riding on this.”
“I’m feeling very futuristic. Can you make sure that all concerned show up?”
“Yeah, but why?”
“I have places to go and people to see. See you later, defribulator.”
Randy clutched the area of his heart but headed out to do his duty.
Temple speed-dialed her cell phone. “Dear Detective Alch,” she began.
He swore. Conservatively but colorfully and with a certain paternal certainty that she would absorb every rough syllable and still twist him around her little finger. . . .
The main thing was that Molina was not here.
This was a totally not-Molina operation.
Temple glanced at Alch. He knew that she knew he was bucking the command structure. She knew that he knew that she knew he had a soft spot for earnest young women with agendas. And that Molina no longer qualified. Too old. Too wired. Too seriously screwed. Too hung up on Max. Either way.
Temple eyed the full complement of White Russian exhibition professionals around the conference table, from the aristocratic elders to the brave new proletariat.
“Two people have died in the course of mounting this exhibition,” she began.
Lips were bitten, heads lowered, crocodile tears shed, so to speak.
“In the course of mounting this exhibition, the prime piece on display, the Czar Alexander scepter, has been stolen in plain sight.”
More feet shuffling under the long conference table, more downcast eyes. Temple stood at the head of the table. Several file folders shifted under her fingernails.
Detective Alch stood, back to the double–conference room doors, fading into a forgotten gray-suited figure. Another man in a suit had slipped in just before the conference room doors closed for good. Tall, angular, sharp, the opposite of Alch, except for the gray suit.
Those gathered around the table fidgeted like the courtroom cast in a Perry Mason television mystery. Some possible witnesses, some possible perps. The semi-anonymous Moscow muscle stood at the table’s opposite, bracketing Dimitri. He was sweating.
Madame Olga’s neck was stretching longer than a swan’s. Count Volpe’s crepey eyelids sank shut like weary sails.
Swans and ships and sealing wax on bureaucratic documents, Temple thought. They were all suspects. Any one of them could have skewered the exhibition for any imaginable cause, old or new.
Except not one of them had done it. Had done anything. None of them had pushed Art-Andrei off a pinnacle platform. Had sabotaged the rigging before the dress rehearsal. Had taken the scepter. Had planned the operation.
Max, she knew, had been a wild card. The joker. The Fool in the Tarot deck. The unsuspected, unpredictable element. Ah, wasn’t he always? Temple smiled in tribute, even as she doubted she’d ever tell him about this moment. About her triumph. That he’d ever be near her again to hear about it.
This was her solo act. Her debut. Temple without Max.
Her job at stake. Her heart at risk. Her pulse racing triple time.
It would be hard to reveal the scenario she suspected without putting Max into it, without revealing that she knew who had the scepter or what she knew about the Synth and its goals.
That was her trick to perform. To paint him as an anonymous confederate of whomever here in the room had engineered the exhibition disruptions on behalf of the real confederate.
“We have two very different deaths here,” she summed up.
“One was man, one woman?” Dimitri asked derisively from his end of the table. His stooges cracked matching smirks.
“The first was a man, and there really wasn’t much point in his death. It only alerted everyone to the fact that someone had a serious eye on the scepter.” Unless that was the point, but Temple wasn’t going to mention that. Her job was to defuse, not confuse. In fact, Andrei’s death was a huge blow to anyone who planned to steal the scepter. It made any attempt harder.
“Therefore,” Temple said, “it must have been an accident.”
Alch shifted his weight unhappily against his door, though nobody but she faced him. Homicide detectives are not crazy about accidental deaths.
“What was Andrei doing up there, then?” Pete Wayans wanted to know.
“Scouting the setup, of course. He was the first one recruited to do what the man in black eventually did: steal the scepter.
“I see,” Count Volpe said. “His accident . . . his fall from grace, forced the thief to hire a new person to ‘crash’ the performance and steal the artwork.”
“But if,” Wayans argued, “he was competent to do high-wire work, why would he fall?”
“I didn’t say he was alone up there,” Temple said. “I’m thinking a difference of expert opinion. Or he wasn’t really willing to risk his bad leg on such a dicey stunt at his age. He was recruited or pressured because of his background. I think he argued with someone here, and in the course of it he overbalanced and fell.”
“Someone here?” Wayans looked around. “These people are all directly involved in sponsoring or mounting the exhibition, except for the corporate sponsors, whom I’m pleased to see you are not subjecting to this humiliation, Miss Barr.”
“It’s better than death,” she said.
“If someone on staff wanted the scepter,” said Count Volpe, delicately adjusting the silk ascot that obscured his stringy neck, “look no farther than the political functionaries. They do not respect symbols of the aristocratic rule, and see only dollar or Euro or ruble signs.”
Dimitri tried to charge out of his chair, but the boys in black held him down. For his own sake.
“And you worthless spawn of the privileged see more?” Dimitri demanded.
“Not only see it,” Volpe drawled, “but we can read it.”
“A nice show,” Temple said, eyeing the combatants, “but it was all a magic act from the beginning. Who are you diverting our eyes from now with your posturings?”
They weren’t about to look in any direction but their fingernails tapping on the exotic tabletop.
Temple eyed Madame Olga.
“He was your brother. You would have been able to persuade him to do the job. You helped design the installation. You would have been able to show him the literal ropes from a point way up high. You would have been positioned to cajole, coax, command him to do it.”
“Steal the scepter? Why would I? Silly goose girl! It is a symbol of my roots. Why would I want it in crass commercial hands?”
“Maybe you thought this Sin City exhibition was a crass commercial venue for a Czarist treasure,” Temple suggested. “Andrei wasn’t meant to fall, to die. I think you had an argument. I think you reversed roles for once up there. I think Andrei the crippled con man didn’t want to rip off one of White Russia’s most amazing artifacts. I think you had to convince him to do it. What words, spoken harshly under the cover of night? Words escalating into gestures, broad gestures? Forgetting where you were? Turning, stepping—?”