“Not Janice! Someone else I don’t even know.”
“That’s been known to happen.”
“Not to me. I’ve got some sort of psychic Teflon coating. People don’t mess with me that way.” ” `People.’ Ah. It was a guy.”
He looked disappointed that she figured it out. “Yeah. I mean, I’m just standing there. .
“Highly inciting. Shouldn’t do it.”
“Temple!”
“You’re not responsible for other people’s actions, or reactions. Forget about it.”
“It’s hard,” he admitted after half a minute. “Here I’ve got Jerome from seminary hanging around, and-”
“Didn’t you get this sort thing in the seminary? From the recent news-”
“No. I didn’t. I walked under this Teflon umbrella all through it. A lot of us did. Calling us naive hardly begins to describe it. It’s just that I’ve seen Janice and Jerome lit into by some witch on wheels, and now I see you getting cosy with Jabba the Hut in a corner … all you’re missing is the chain-mail bikini.”
“I can get one,” Temple said brightly.
“What?”
“A chain-mail bikini. I know a guy in the desert, name of Mace. He custom makes them. Knives too.”
“Temple. That was just a figure of speech. And how did you run into an outlaw character like that?”
“I have my ways. Matt, lighten up! This is the opening event for a big new commercial venture. People are going to be nervous. They are going to be crabby. They are going to be paranoid.”
“You think I’m overreacting.”
“Did I say that?”
“No. But I knew what you were thinking.”
“Then will you get it for me for Christmas?”
He sighed then, and really looked at her. “You’re right. This other stuff is mostly nothing. I was worried about who I saw you with.”
“I wasn’t worried about who I saw you with.”
“No?” He stepped a little closer as all expert interrogators do. “She said you were.”
“She did?”
“Who?”
“Whoever we’re talking about.”
Temple realized that they hadn’t been this near, or this alone, since a close encounter in the hallway to her apartment before everything went to hell a couple weeks ago. If you could call having everyone you know involved in a suspicious death
“hell?’
“Look,” she said. “It’s been a rough couple of weeks. I think everyone is a little edgy. I was supposed to be finding my meal ticket. Apparently something is ‘Wong’ in the Maylords world right now.”
“That’s a terrible pun, but I guess she deserves it, from what you’ve implied. So what’s keeping you?”
Temple shrugged, and waited for him to catch on.
He stepped back. “Sony. Guess the paranoia is catching.” She scooted around him and hit heels to travertine to head for
the front of the store.
She wasn’t surprised Matt was a little gun-shy after all he’d been through with his truly terrifying stalker. This crowd was trendy and filled with temperamental artist types. Temperamental artist types were often in-your-face. Kind of like Amelia Wong. Actually, Wong remained a cipher. It was her staff that was in-your-face.
Speaking of which, Temple had no sooner touched toe to the festive central area than she saw Amelia Wong finally facing off with someone in person. That someone was her Asian opposite: master chef Song of the Crystal Phoenix.
Call him Yang (although Temple had never known his first name). Call him Yang can cook. Call her Yin. Call her Yin-Yang can’t abide disharmony.
Call this a Zen shoot-out.
Kenny Maylord noticed Temple’s presence with a huge relieved sigh and came skittering over on the QT. “Thank God.
She’s rearranging his buffet table and he looks ready to restyle her hair-do with his chopping cleaver.”
“Never argue with a chef. They’re armed and dangerous.”
“Can you do anything with them? The TV videographers have been eating up this unpleasant scene.”
Temple braved a gantlet of four-hundred-watt lighting to enter the fray, which was spotlit by the small sun of a TV camera
light.
“Can I help?” she asked.
Chef Song, who knew her by sight as the PR rep for his employer, the Crystal Phoenix Hotel and Casino, stopped gesticulating like an armed windmill. He folded his arms, and cleaver, across his chest.
“This lady changes my buffet.”
“This man,” Wong said, “offends the inner yin with the inharmonious color of his arrangement. I cannot allow people to eat from such an ungoverned display.”
“Food is set out delicately,” said Chef Song, “in a fan of flavor, like scented flowers in a garden. Color is in second place.” “The eye and spirit must always be paramount.”
“What does a movie company have to do with Song’s buffet table? Only movie company in Las Vegas is the MGM-Grand Hotel and the three-story lion out front would make you eat your foolish words, if he were here.”
Temple took a deep breath. Chef Song was first-generation Chinese. His grasp of the language in times of stress grew colorful, to say the least. She knew his history. He had been an enormously wealthy Hong Kong businessman who had lost everything at the gaming tables … and then had reinvented himself in midlife in a foreign country as a chef. The career change had been fortuitous. He attacked his new role with youthful passion.
Apparently his commitment had found some answering pas in that media ice maiden, Amelia Wong. Ms. Wong’s American first name was the hallmark these days of a second-or third-generation AsianAmerican torn between two worlds and doing quite spectacularly in both, thank you.
“Shrimp can be here,” Amelia Wong declared. “Shrimp is orange and delicate in taste. Pork must be to the extremes. It is strong and earthy.”
“Sweet and sour,” he riposted. “Sauce for each dish is sweet-and-sour. You keep sweet-and-sour together. For balance.
As with yang and yin.”
“Ym and yang. You can’t even get that right.”
“I have get everything all right until you come on scene.”
Temple considered that many a feng shui client might think the same thing after a domestic makeover according to Wong.
People were generally torn between acting as immobile as a herd of sheep or snapping up every convenient trend that sprang up around them like clover. And so they were ready to knock over the traces and leave the trends behind in an empty pasture … with other, earthier leavings.
“Isn’t there some compromise?” Temple asked, stepping between the combatants.
He said: “No. Food does not compromise. Chef never compromise.”
She said: “How can one compromise with divine harmony?”
Temple lowered her voice. “Listen. Maylords is paying you both princely sums to enhance their opening festivities. Surely the universe of divine harmony recognizes fiscal balance. Bottom line? Checkbook?” “Principle,” Ms. Wong declared through grape-glossed lips, “is everything.”
“In financial matters as well as spiritual ones,” Temple pointed out.
Ms. Wong received this observation in silence.
Hooray, Temple had rung a bell. Maybe on a cash register.
“I can move the pork down three places, no more.” Chef Song pointed magnanimously with the cleaver, to which a few translucent flakes of raw onion clung like … yuck, tissue.
Ms. Wong’s obsidian eyes followed the gesture and studied the suggestive CSI-like evidence clinging to the broad steel blade.
Her eyes and voice matched the cleaver’s sharpness. “That would be sufficient. I must have my shrimp central and foremost.”
He bowed. “Shrimp is the empress of appetizers.” “Agreed. It was never about the shrimp.”
Ms. Amelia had to look up to look down her snub nose at him. She had accomplished this while accessorized with… Temple, impressed, sneaked a quick peek downward. Wow! Seattle space-needle-high Jimmy Choo heels, several seasons newer than Temple’s.