Jon looked back and forth between them. “You’re that kind of a team already?”
They looked at each other and shrugged with a smile.
“I guess we are,” Temple said.
“So that’s the way things will have to stay for a while longer,” Matt said. “In suspended animation.”
“It’s killing my brother.” Jon frowned and then sighed. “He’s coming to me for advice. If we all sat down and you refereed—”
“No. Not yet.” Matt was firm. “You’re a heck of a nice guy and so, I bet, is your brother, or my mother would never have fallen for the both of you. I’d be proud to have a new father and uncle, but my mother isn’t ready for a ‘one big happy.’ And she’s the one who’s borne the burden of your mutual regard for her. “Don’t you get it?” Matt asked his father. “Thirty-five years is a nanosecond when it comes to the human heartbeat.”
Temple noticed that Jon had been looking more and more sheepish as Matt spoke, and now made his closing argument.
“Face it, Jon. She’s scared to death she’ll still feel something for you if you met again, under any circumstances. And I bet you are too.”
“Do you believe she does?”
Matt turned to Temple. “What do you think now that you’ve met the birth parents?”
“I haven’t met Philip,” she said, “so this is a half-boiled opinion.” Temple was not about to mention she was personally quite familiar with romantic tangles, popularly known as “triangles.”
“Mira needs to see you again,” she told Jon, “to see for herself that the past is buried, even if you aren’t.”
“Wise advice, Miss Barr,” Matt told her, his penetrating eyes reading hers. “Would you like to appear on my talk show?”
“Of course.” She smiled. “But I get a lifetime contract.”
Chapter 26
Lurking Lusty Laddies
“I may be off-duty,” Rafi told Max, “but this is my territory.”
The Oasis was Las Vegas’s answer to the Taj Mahal. In fact, the giant gazebo by the pool out back was a re-creation of the Taj Mahal.
The Oasis’s fabled towers shimmered like glitter-dusted alabaster in the daylight, and a giant pair of exotically painted elephants stood at attention, glittering palanquins on their distant backs, flashing polyurethane tusks long enough, and strong enough, to seat the Mormon Tabernacle Choir for a photo opportunity. One foot and two faux ivory tusks each were eternally raised in welcome, along with their one-story-long trunks. Those hiked painted toenails, if animated, could have flattened a Humvee.
The human curbside greeters up front were costumed as Sabu, the elephant boy, with sun-burnished to gleaming cinnamon skin, wearing only brocade turbans and harem pants.
What snagged Max’s attention though, were the almost seven-foot-tall giant-bellied harem eunuchs holding three-foot-long curved swords and guarding a horizontal freezer-size transparent Plexiglas treasure chest crammed with paper money. Turning his head, Max could inspect thousands of slices of the Great Inventor’s face, aka Benjamin Franklin, gracing hundred-dollar bills.
“What’s with the cash wishing well?” he asked Rafi.
“Mucho security headaches until Friday. It’s a prize for the week’s biggest slot machine winner. A million bucks.”
“The sidewalk and undercarriage are wired, right?”
“Right. And don’t ask too many questions or I’ll think you’re really here to knock it off. And I’d have to shoot you.”
Inside, the visitor pushed through crowds milling in an exotic jungle landscape, complete with monkeys and birds, in which the ringing of slot machines chimed like dimly heard temple bells.
“Impressive,” Max agreed as they passed the elephants. “I’ve always wanted to make an elephant disappear.”
“Better you make us disappear.” Rafi was terse, and tense. “Remember. If you get into any fisticuffs in the hotel surveillance underbelly, it’s my rear.”
“There’s only one anatomical site I’m interested in here, and it’s a murder site, past tense.”
“I was in on the capture of a murderer at the Dancing With the Celebs reality TV show here recently. That was in the theater area.”
“Good for you.” Max smiled. “Don’t worry. I won’t jinx your career in security. According to maddeningly vague references in Gandolph’s home computer, there’ve been a string of unsolved deaths that have nagging connections to … me.”
“Oh, great. And here I volunteered to be your backup buddy.”
“It was a paid position.”
“Originally. And now?”
“And now, if Gandolph’s notes and my need to figure out who tried to kill me at the Neon Nightmare club helps solve this string of rather bizarre but possibly related deaths over the past two years, I can see you get cred with Molina for the breakthroughs. That’ll melt the Iron Maiden of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s stony heart into raspberry slush, or at least into giving you visitation rights with your daughter.”
“You underestimate the calcification of Carmen’s mercy muscle, but I’m working on it,” Rafi said with a grin. “If we go trolling around the Oasis together for too long, though, it’ll look like I’ve got a new boyfriend.”
“‘Prospective employee,’” Max said. “I just need to see the Oasis’s revamped sexy pirate girl show and inspect the ship that comes round the bend to sink so spectacularly.”
“Most tourist guys want to inspect the sexy pirate girls.”
“I don’t think they killed anybody, do you?”
“The tourist guys or the sexy pirate girls?”
“Either.”
“It’s a popular attraction, night and day. Who knows what evil lurks in randy tourists.”
* * *
Rafi led the way out of the hotel and through the usual milling throngs. The pirate ship show was free, which accounted for the tourist hordes lining the sidewalk outside the hotel. A wooden walk-the-plank bridge connected to a hotel entrance over a broad moat of water.
The attraction had resembled a set for a pirate film long before Captain Jack Sparrow went viral, so Max knew what to expect. His six-foot-four height made it easier to see over the hundreds of heads, even with many arms extended straight up to record phone videos of the show.
“Do we start,” Max asked, “by ogling the nearly naked girls in the crow’s nest or the naked female figurehead on the sinking ship’s prow?”
“We’ll check out the enemy ship that comes around the bend in the landscaping just to sink later. This script is cheesy. ‘Lusty Ladies and Laddies’ at war. The special effects aren’t.”
Rafi, who’d obviously had a chance to watch the attraction on slimmer attendance days, or nights, pointed out the obvious. “This used to be a rousing, family-friendly all-out action battle between freebooting pirates and the pursuing government ships.”
“I remember those days.” Max surveyed the bikini-clad “sirens” clambering over the three-masted sailing ship that anchored the show. “Now it’s become an arousing battle between the sexes. The only suspense factor is what will stay put longer, the pirate showgirls’ mic packs or their same-sized bikini pieces.”
“I sure wouldn’t take my teen daughter here to see good role models.”
“Parenthood makes new men of us all. These chorines have been trained into pretty solid athletes,” Max said after observing the action. “Those swordfights and fiery dives from the top rigging are tough routines.”
“Nothing new for you. Didn’t you have the usual magician’s assistants who could go topless for the late show?”
“No. I preferred to invent less blatant distractions for my audiences. I worked alone. More cerebral.”