Temple, being advertised as the city’s “finest little private eye,” had to ask herself an unpleasant question. Had Aldo’s girlfriend just had a tragic accident, or had it been murder too?
Memories of the Fall
“Garry,” Max asked the man he believed had been his mentor and “handler” since he was seventeen, “why do I have a psychiatrist assigned to me?”
Garry was wheeling him through the gardens again, after having checked the wheelchair and Max’s pajamas for recording devices the size of a flea, or not much larger. He had graduated from the butt-baring hospital gown.
“They claim it’s standard practice for victims of head injury and memory loss. That makes sense. This is a world-renowned facility. I’ve looked into Mademoiselle, or Fraulein, Doctor Schneider’s professional and personal background. She is highly qualified. Degrees from Heidelberg and the Paris Psychiatric Clinic. She travels all over the world, at stratospheric fees, to discreetly aid some very global players. Rupert Murdoch has used her, not personally.”
“Who’s paying her in this case?”
“We are. You, actually.”
“How much?”
“Fifty thousand dollars for three weeks, a renewable contract.”
“Fifty thousand? For a little knee patty-cake? I must have a lot more money than I know, but I don’t think I’d spend it on this. Fire her.”
“It might look suspicious if you didn’t get the best of everything, Mr. Anonymous world-class, rich man mountain climber. Or that I wasn’t as concerned as the doctors about your memory loss. Which I am. She might do some actual good. And what’s with the knee patty-cake?”
“My patty, her knee. But she put it there first.”
“Do you think she’s trying to pump you?”
“Please put that more genteelly, Garry. I can’t tell if she’s a sincere therapist, or a sinister inquisitor-cum-watchdog masquerading as a sexy lady. She’s clever. Mentally agile. As with a lot of Frenchwomen, flirting is a genetic marker. Mostly, I think her sessions are worthless for liberating my memory, but good for my ego.”
“So she could be worth it under the label of ‘morale’?”
“Under the label of ‘not looking suspicious, and doing what they tell us.’ She does exercise my wits.”
“Your casts are coming off soon. Then it’s physical therapy.”
“No. I want out. You say I have good instincts. I’m sensing an . . . atmosphere here. I’m being watched. The minute these casts are cracked open, you break me out. Say we’re using a private therapist at my fabulously equipped retreat in . . . Bahrain.”
Garry chuckled. “The details may be escaping you, my boy, but your style is perfectly intact. You always could charm the snakes into the basket.”
He hadn’t wanted to trouble the old man. He knew he was being watched by a lot of people, people patients weren’t expected to notice, like cleaning personnel, nursing aides, certainly Mademoiselle Fraulein Doctor Schneider. He was also going crazy kept down and inactive by these damnable casts. Did he really need them? Were they a ploy to keep him prisoner?
Then the memory of his body soaring toward that shiny black wall from unsupported space returned. He was lucky to be alive. Like a drunk driver, she’d said, too out of it to tense up and get really hurt. He wheeled himself to the window, back and forth, a form of pacing he couldn’t manage physically.
Was he really that in command of his mind and body, enough to convert that fatal hit into a minor accident? Certainly he hadn’t managed to keep his memory. But memory loss in severe accidental injuries is common. What wasn’t normal, at least for his expectations; it wasn’t coming back. The memory. His legs weren’t the problem. He was relatively young. They’d heal. He was an athlete of sorts, even if he didn’t buy the role of mountain climber.
He expected more from his memory. From himself. Damn it! Now was not the time to have a little brain crash! He paused to stare up at the postcard peaks rising like a colossal shark’s maws around him. He shivered. Cold. Icy. Killing. Everything he didn’t like in a landscape. Everything he didn’t like in a woman.
Ladies-in-Waiting
Temple moved on to the parlor, where Kit had corralled the Sapphire Slipper’s staff.
Kit came snowshoeing over the thick wool carpet to Temple like a happy puppy.
“I’ve been getting acquainted with the girls,” she whispered. “What a tragicomic bunch of life stories! They’re a whole play by Eugene O’Neill via Neil Simon. They make A Chorus Line look like Little Orphan Annie. I’m getting an idea for a revue here. A play. A novel!
“A bunch of women are trapped in snowstorm in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, only it’s in Nevada—maybe the mountains, there’s snow there, right?—and there are no men in the cast. Just the women talking: whores and wives and would-be wives. Wolves howling in the distance—”
“A perfect offstage role for the Fontana pack,” Temple interrupted.
“Wolves? No, these would be real wolf voices, tribal brutality at bay, the Taliban, maybe—”
“Kit, I hate to derail the creative muse when it’s mingling Medea with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum with White Fang, but I just learned something pretty awful, and—worse—maybe relevant.”
“About what?”
“About who,” Temple whispered, grabbing her aunt’s thin wrist and pulling her into the archway to the bar, where Fontana Inc. awaited under the supervision of Van von Rhine. “The girlfriends said Aldo’s significant other died a year ago. She was an aerial performer and fell during practice. Broke her neck. Did you know that?”
Kit had sobered instantly, plunging from creative mania into deep concern.
“Yes. He told me, of course. He said he liked that I did something safe. What could happen to a writer?”
“No wonder the poor man freaked when you were mistaken for me at the Red Hat Sisterhood convention and attacked with a garrote.”
“I think that only made both of us realize we didn’t want to be apart.”
“Maybe you’re not so safe. We assumed you were attacked because you wore a pink hat and are my physical double.”
“Yeah?”
“But what if it was because you were seeing Aldo morning, noon, and midnight?”
Kit had always been a fast study. She bit her lip and looked around the not-so-innocent rooms that surrounded them. “That’s what you learned from interviewing the Fontana brothers’ ditsy girlfriends?”
Temple nodded. “Maybe one’s not so ditsy, but got fixated on Aldo—”
“Maybe crazy like a fox.” Kit nodded too. “Maybe you better interview these real ‘foxes’ fast to get an idea of what’s really going on in this henhouse.”
“Maybe, and amen.”
Temple found that the sisters of joy, gathered en masse in a Victorian-style parlor with no men around to make them bill and coo, looked a lot like of dispirited hens on a rococo roost. All that blue together was starting to look . . . tired. Even tawdry.
Not only their feathers, but their faces seemed to droop.
“Wouldn’t you all normally be hard at work now?” Temple asked as she sat on a plump, tiger-striped ottoman.
“Depends on what you consider ‘work,’ “ one noted in a desultory voice.
“Earning money,” Temple said briskly. She wasn’t going to be trapped into thinking of them as “exotic.” It wasn’t a coincidence that another euphemism for their ancient profession was “workingwoman.” And not a coincidence that employed women from the 1890s streets of New York to modern-day Baghdad were called “no better than whores.”