"Try it after you add the name of the society. The Synth."
"Sinth? As if you want to say 'since' and you lisp?"
"It's spelled with a y."
"Kind of like that designer drug, Hyacinth?"
"Exactly. Maybe the Synth was behind that smuggling operation. Well, they do exist. I've seen documents from them."
"What kind of documents?"
"Threatening letters. On parchment in Old English script. Like--"
"Like props in a high school Shakespeare play?"
"Maybe. but I've also seen threatening computer messages from them."
"Where? At home?"
"No, at---On Gandolph's old computer. Max showed one to me."
"This 'Sy"nth' sounds like all shadow and no substance."
"It could be just that. Or not."
"What's really bothering you, Temple? You're talking a mile a minute. I don't think a couple pretentious messages from this Synth could do that."
"Well, there's another reason I'd kinda like you along on this outing."
"You don't have to tell me why."
"It's just that I'm not really, really keen on visiting the Opium Den again."
She could tell he was searching her expression with a sudden concern she'd rather not look straight in the face. It reminded her of that awful night out on the highway, and what had gone before.
"I'm not crazy about it either," Matt said, "your visiting the Opium Den again. Even though she's gone. Shangri-la is a fraud and thief for sure, and maybe even worse."
"Matt!" Temple hit the brakes, realized that her rear view mirror showed a van close on her tail light, accelerated rapidly enough to jolt them both, and finally pulled over at the first empty stretch of curb she spotted.
"Matt? Do you know what you just said I"
"I said that Shangri-La is a bad lady, but nothing to be afraid of anymore." His face tautened, as if he had just remembered a secret he wished he had never known. "She left."
" 'She left!' Yes! The message on Molina's car."
Matt's face remained empty of every emotion but concern and confusion. "But . . . the ex-nun had nothing to do with Shangri-La, or magic."
"But the Leopard Lady did! Gloria Fuentes. Gandolph's former right-hand woman. And the
'she left' showed up on her body in the morgue. Okay, at the medical examiners. But I still like
'morgue' better. It has class, 'morgue.' "
"I don't see what you're so excited about."
"Well, you might think the second strangling was an imitative killing. Copycat, they call it. But maybe the message was the copycat part, not the killing. Somebody knew, or learned of, the message on Molina's car, and duplicated it, after the fact."
"Why? Just to bug Molina?"
"Maybe. Wouldn't you like to bug Molina now and then?"
"Not really. She's done a decent job--"
"Oh, come on. She rides right over whoever she pleases to get what she wants."
"It's her job."
"Is persecuting Max her job too ?"
"Maybe. He's been involved in some dicey things, if you'd just look at him with a little distance--"
"Oh, like from he's on Alcatraz and I'm in Las Vegas, is that enough distance for you?"
"Not. Quite."
"What would he? Aldebaran in the Hyades?"
"Huh! Temple, you're getting overexcited."
"Of course I am. It's what I do best." She leaned back in the seat, let her hands fall from the steering wheel. "Molina and Max aside, the fact is that those words appearing on the Leopard Lady's corpse are pure . . . theater."
"Magic."
"Magic, if you will. So, say the murders aren't connected."
"I don't think they are, because what I think happened to the woman Molina found . . . well.
I know who did it, Temple. Nose E. though so too, for whatever reason. Some smell. But we're just humans. We can't convict a man on something only a dog can smell."
"We can on DNA." She checked her rear view mirror again.
"Look. Help me check out these ESP types at the Opium Den, and I'll go back to church with you and we'll try to smoke out your murderer on the homeboy front."
"You think we can?"
"I think you can, if you just set your mind on it."
"Temple."
"Yes?"
"Let's go. Wherever. But . . . I'm sorry you lost your ring."
"My ring--? Oh."
He was silent for an International Coffee moment.
"Well," she said, sighing, "I am too. It went so well with your pendant."
When he looked up, amazed and hopeful and appalled, she was absorbed in putting the car into gear and pulling away from the curb.
The sudden acceleration knocked him back in the seat.
Chapter 58
The Usual Unusual Suspects
In daylight hours, the Opium Den's brash neon marquee was a gray-white expanse as dull as dead skin cells.
The tawdry sex-and-skin-parlors on either side seemed painted on canvas by a circus circular designer.
Matt inhaled deeply. Revisiting a place where Temple had recently been so endangered, and he had been so helpless, was like walking into an elaborately unreal dreamscape. In fact, Matt felt he was entering a cartoon-factory set, with nothing behind the exaggerated facades but empty cells.
Yet the interior surprised him.
The Opium Den's gaudy lobby bristled with booths and Celtic lettering. Incense spiced the air. Bells, drums, and Moog synthesizers swelled the sound system.
Temple stood beside him, surprised too, and subdued.
She hadn't expected the scene of her most recent trauma to have been transformed into a New Age Renaissance Fair.
"Okay?" he asked.
"Okay. Hey. I kinda dig this. Maybe we can play we're tourists."
"Aren't we?"
"Gauche, but true. Now, where are our most-likely-to-murder candidates?"
"I doubt they're advertising." Matt gazed in some wonder over the scene. "This is an alternate spirituality universe," be decided. "A little Asian, a lot flaky, and kinda charming, in a naive way."
"Yes. But it has a dark underside. Never forget that."
He laughed. "Doesn't everything?"
"I guess so. So! Vere are my prey?" Temple curved her lacquered nails into exaggerated claws.
"You tell me."
So they wove through the booths and tents, pausing at appropriate stops.
"Ossss-carr Granttt," she hissed, pulling Matt to a sudden stop. Matt eyed the well-coifed, dark-haired man she indicated. He reminded Matt of a well-fed cobra who hosted a televangelist hour on the side. And maybe did faux-diamond infomercials on the other side.
"Looks like Crawford Buchanan after a personality-suction." Temple giggled. "He is too, too serious, but let's ask him some leading questions." They sidled over.
"Are you Dead Zones watchers?" the man asked them first, before he had even fully turned to acknowledge the presence he--eerily---sensed.
"Only in Las Vegas," Temple said.
"Temple Barr! The stage manager of our last, least-conclusive seance!"
Close up, Grant looked more than ever the young George Hamilton clone: razor-cut, tanned, brunette as a plump hotel-breakfast prune.
Matt felt his hackles rising, although he shouldn't have worried. Temple had a built-in sleaze detector. Still, worrying about what he shouldn't worry about was one of the best features of his current state.
"This is my friend Matt," she said, omitting his last name so no belabored greeting rituals would be necessary.
Matt didn't mind; Oscar Grant struck him as someone who was always playing a role.
"What brings you to our gathering?"
"I was going to ask you what brings you back to Las Vegas?"
"Oh, my show does quite a few episodes here. Know any good psychic phenomena l should look into?"
"Well, there's always the Crystal Phoenix Ghost suite."
"The hotel has a ghost?"
Temple nodded. "The manager swears to have seen it. Jersey Joe Jackson, a shady character around Las Vegas before it was more than four motels and a casino, lived in the seventh-floor suite of the Joshua Tree before it was remodeled into the Crystal Phoenix. Now, the hotel is adding an underground theme park and ride based on Jersey Joe's reputation for hiding treasure underground all over Vegas."