By now I am panting, bleeding, and furious.
I must head-butt a heavy Roman shade aside until it slips its bottom moorings. I plummet to the wooden floor inside, not landing on my abused feet. I do not know which is worse: more foot trauma or knocking my teeth on some thick circle of leather embedded with spikes.
Eek! My own black facial leather has touched a recreational dog collar! Spitting out the awful taste, I box my way out of the room in the darkness into the hall.
Luckily, it is lined with night-lights even during the daytime, a touch I am sure the Sapphire Slipper clientele much appreciate both coming and going.
I find my way into another room, this one decorated more like a bedchamber than a doggy discipline school. I jump back when I glimpse a black cat in the mirror.
Oops. That is me, but my hair is a mess. I look almost as ragged as Ma Barker.
Now. I gaze around as my eyes adapt to the dim light.
I need a signal. Something like a white flag of surrender. Something that will draw every human eye to my form and will sufficiently intrigue someone in this mob of guys and gals and my usual associates to follow me to where the criminal is hiding out.
It certainly will not be a canine collar!
Something bright catches my eye. It is light, small, but memorable.
Just the thing!
Leading Questions
It was now high noon and Temple was getting butterflies in her stomach.
Van von Rhine called the LVMPD to report the situation, which meant Molina would soon know about her latest and most bizarre crime scene involvement yet. Aldo and Nicky comforted her by saying that Nye County would have had to call in the Vegas CSI unit anyway. Temple’s investigative calls on Madonnah’s hidden number must have stirred some powerful forces into action. The idea of helicopters, plural, had really upset her.
Van worked under her maiden name, so at least the volatile surnames of Fontana and Barr need not come up right off the bat. And it would look better for all concerned if they called the authorities before the distant Big Guys showed up.
Matt was standing close behind Van to back up her story, and intervene if Lieutenant Molina got involved and went ballistic. The homicide detective had always liked him.
All of it made perfect sense, but Temple couldn’t bear staying with the barroom crowd and listening to Van’s end of the conversation. They now knew the “why” but not the “who,” which made this a pretty half-baked effort on her part.
She’d been imported to the Sapphire Slipper to solve the murder, and without a murderer identified, everyone, including her nearest and dearest, was still a prime suspect. Plus, the first scheduled clients were driving out of Vegas even now to add to the Sapphire Slipper’s already overcrowded population.
Temple was a proven failure.
She ambled through the parlor and the dozing courtesans into the deserted foyer to brood. No one noticed or missed her. Even with the hectic events of the past few hours and all the new faces she’d met, nagging worries about Max danced in and out of her mind.
You can’t worry about the whole world, she told herself.
She was so exhausted she’d start hallucinating soon.
And then something came floating down the stairs from the deserted second floor. The supposedly deserted second floor.
Her mind refused to believe her eyes.
A disembodied crimson thong trimmed in marabou feathers floated down toward her. Madonnah’s ghost was up and walking? Or crawling, rather. Even creepier!
The apparition was already breezing past her to the front door when she finally made out the black feline form whose neck it adorned. Finally! After all these hours out here, she had been granted a glimpse of her own elusive cat!
It had to be Louie. His broad-cheeked tomcat face squeezed out a snarl as his paw scratched a gash into the door’s dark wood.
Temple started laughing, hysterically. Louie in boudoir wear? A flaming red thong? Louie a panty sniffer? A pantywaist? A red-hot thong-head?
She almost doubled over from laughing, but figured that the small resident cat probably had a petite box that no one had remembered to change lately, and Louie might desperately need a potty break.
She went to the door, and opened it.
Into the shockingly bright daylight Louie bounded. The bordello was like a casino in that all sense of “outside” disappeared when one was inside. Time stopped. Night was eternal.
Louie had just reminded her that a bright, sunlit world surrounded them. The light also showed how alarmingly tight the wisp of nylon was around his neck.
“Wait! Louie! That thing could choke you if it caught on something.”
He stopped, as if understanding her. Temple ran to catch him. He darted off, around the building’s corner.
Darn! Trust a cat to act independent just when he most needed a little human help. Temple stomped over the hard, shifting sandy ground through the desert scrub.
The building’s exterior looked rough and tawdry in daylight. The courtesans’ quarters off the main building’s kitchen was just a string of linked single-wide trailers.
Louie led her around them into higher brush and cactus that raked her bare calves. Temple stopped, blinking in the hot sunlight.
“Louie, you dork! I am not chasing you over the equivalent of the Ethel M Chocolate Factory cactus garden. I refuse to follow you another step.”
Silence. Then a pathetic yowl from out of sight.
Temple glanced back at the Sapphire Slipper. The front entrance was almost out of sight. She sighed and trudged forward again, surprised when a rough-sided wooden structure came into view.
She edged closer, hearing something faint and tinny.
A radio?
Someone was out here? A caretaker? No one had mentioned . . .
The sound cut off, as if it had been a mistake.
A gash of bright red near the worn wooden barn door ajar on its shaky hinges made her tiptoe over the sand.
Louie had found something out here he was returning to. Maybe food. She saw shreds of what looked like cooked meat on the sand near the door. Or, he had found someone.
Radio Silence
The last thing I expected to hear from the barn was a blast from the past.
But there it was, for a few unguarded seconds, some soul anthem, “R-E-S-P-E-C-T.”
I realize at once what has happened, especially since the radio went dead again, fast. Our resident killer has gotten one of the three disabled vehicles going, and the radio had been left on when it was stopped.
The reviving vehicle could be the brothel Jeep Tracker, or its van, or it could be the Gangsters’ Vanillamobile. That station sounded like something the long-stemmed Asiah would listen to once the limo’s dividing window was up and no sound would flow through to the main body of the stretch Rolls.
Whatever the vehicle and whoever the driver who had tuned into that station, now an escape vehicle is coming to life, and my Miss Temple and I are caught like deer in the headlights. Well, headlights are not very strong in daylight, but the fact is something inside the barn is primed to start moving again soon and we must get our rears in gear too.
I wheel around and dash toward my Miss Temple at a gallop, finding she is only twenty feet behind me, which is good trotting for a short-legged breed like her, but not good enough for effecting a fast, quiet, and unseen retreat.
I hear the barn-door hinges squeal behind me, and watch Miss Temple’s face register dismay in front of me.
Talk about caught between a car and an accident waiting to happen!
I expect Miss Temple’s face to register some joy or relief at my presence on the scene, but she is busy freezing in midturn and looking behind me and putting her palms up in the air to test the desert breeze.