travertine tiles, a sack of pale laundry.
Amelia Wong’s tiny high-heeled feet stuttered backwards like a Yorkshire terrier’s: click, click, click.
The falling body, for it was exactly that, settled lumpily on the hard shining floor.
The bowl fell beside it, flooding the area with orange peels and water.
Apparently the Murano’s bad chi had been more thoroughly expelled than expected.
Chapter 21
Feng Shui Can Be Mudra
Videographers surrounded the huddled corpse like technobuzzards.
Their rush to tape the scene squeezed Amelia Wong outside the circle of T-shirt-and-jeans-clad ghouls.
She stood back stunned, her complexion gone ghost white. A stray orange peel had washed up on the toe of her beige-silk pump.
Temple nodded to the nearest Wong associate, Pritchard Merriweather. “Call nine-one-one, right away.”
Kenny Maylord stood helplessly witnessing the lurid discovery from the fringes.
“Get your security people,” Temple told him. “Someone needs to try CPR. And if it’s too late for that, these media people are messing up what may be a crime scene.”
“M-may be?”
“We can’t even tell the gender of the person yet, much less the identity.” Temple turned to the six people hunched over their shoulder-held cameras like hyenas.
“Back, you camera goons!” she ordered in the gruffest basso she could produce. “This person may need air!”
Before she’d finished, two Maylords security guys and Amelia Wong’s shade-wearing bodyguards, all attired in dark suits, were grabbing T-shirts and manhandling men, women, and machines out of their way.
The body curled into a fetal position on the floor looked lonely. Temple knew how to demand order, but she wasn’t quite up
to exploring the condition of the fallen figure.
One of the suits went down on one knee and slowly lifted a shoulder off the floor.
Temple glimpsed blond hair, short blond hair and a smudge of features … forehead, chin.
For a second she was sure it was Matt, and her heart stopped.
Then she saw it was Simon.
She thought she made a tiny sound of denial, but it could have come from someone else.
The scene turned instantly surreal.
One of the suits turned the person over, pounded the chest, worked the chest like a bellows, pounded and pushed. No “kiss of life” nowadays, no mouth-breathing, not since AIDS had made blood and saliva dangerous.
Temple watched, numb.
“Who is it?” someone asked over her shoulder.
“I don’t know.” Nobody unofficial should make that call yet. “Wait.”
Sirens wailed in the distance.
Temple watched for any flicker of an eyelash, any heave of the chest.
There was only the dead, implacable rhythm of CPR, of using a motionless chest as a drum skin and trying to beat it back
into a semblance of life.
The sirens rose to a deafening shriek and then stopped. EMTs in jumpsuits landed on Maylords’s interior turf like paratroopers, rushing, pushing aside the guy who was working on Simon, towing a gurney and an urgent attitude behind them.
Latex-gloved figures bent over him, muffled his face with an oxygen mask to breathe for him, looking to spark some life
still within him.
Temple found herself eyeing an empty spot on the floor. Beside it, a crouching man, hands braced on knees, gasped to recapture his own spent breath.
Rafi Nadir.
She stared.
He recovered enough to look up and notice her. The EMTs had lifted Simon onto the gurney. Wheels were skidding over the polished floor and through the main entrance. Everyone else had ebbed away, following the storm’s center to the parking lot.
“He’s … gay,” she said.
Nadir looked to the side, angry. “Christ. You don’t get it. Talking the talk is just shorthand. Street shorthand. I do my job.” She didn’t get it.
He straightened. “I’m too damn out of shape. Too damn out of shape to do anyone any good.” “You did all you could.”
“Not enough.” His face curdled with disgust. Self-disgust. “Don’t look at me like that. Get outta here.”
She spun on her heel and did as he said, racing to the parking lot where the ambulance was screaming away into the lateafternoon Las Vegas traffic.
Media vans screeched in its wake.
The people marooned on the asphalt watched with dead eyes.
“What hospital?” Temple asked Pritchard, who stood tall and alone by a second parked Gangsters limo. Lime green. The Kermit. Kids loved it.
“Mercy? You have one here named that?’
“No, but shouldn’t everyone?”
Temple stood staring after the vanishing ambulance: it was headed for Sunrise Columbia Hospital. She ached to follow it, but that wasn’t the most effective thing she could do. Kenny Maylord was doing that, and they had each other’s cell phone numbers.
First, she had to go inside to calm down Amelia Wong and company, and the Maylords staff. Second, she had to brief Mark Ainsworth on what to give, and not give, the media. Mr. You’ll-be-axed-in-three-months was not a promising candidate for suave media management. Third, as a fail-safe, she had to touch base with all the local media by cell phone to make sure she was their first, and last, contact on any follow-up. And in the middle of all this damage control, she needed to make a radical detour for a mission of mercy. Thank God for cell phones that would keep her finger on the pulse of events even when she was on the road.
Her major personal priority right now had to be off the record: escaping the scene of the crime to find and tell Danny Dove what had happened.
In this world of constant wireless contact, only a face-to-face would do. Temple also understood that actually and finally knowing for sure what had happened … and why … would only come much later. If ever.
Chapter 22
Slow Dancing
Temple headed to the sprawling pseudo-Saharan Oasis Hotel.
Danny was drilling dancers there, working up a huge new show. Rehearsing night and day. The start-up cost was millions. Temple recalled Simon lightly chiding Danny for his frequent recent absences the night of the Maylords opening. A fond pride. An intimate’s good-natured complaint.
Like she would joke about Max being the Invisible Man in her life.
She found herself walking into the Oasis’s Sub-Zero air-conditioning, moving among murmuring crowds into the noisy heat
of action and risk.
Theaters always were located at the rear of Las Vegas hotels, discreet marquees meant to be resorted to only when gaming was temporarily deserted.
This theater marquee was dark. A placard announced the future opening of another Danny Dove spectacular. Toddlin’ Towns, a tribute to the world’s great show cities. Paris, Chicago, London, New York…
Temple pushed through the easy-opening double doors into the back of the huge, raked house.
Far below, the stage was a black postage stamp pierced with pinpoints of lurid light.
Antlike, people milled in kaleidoscopic patterns below Danny’s art. Making motion into emotion. Patterns into phenomena.
Temple walked down the carpeted aisle, her heels digging in like pitons against the inevitable pull of gravity that tried to
make her stutter into a trot and finally a run. Digging in against inevitability.
As she got closer, she could hear Danny exercising his voice like a ringmaster cracking his whip.. Conductors commanded and cajoled with mute arm movements and expressions. Stage directors ruled with pages of postperformance lined notes. Choreographers created with voice and motion, physical presence and command.
They took your breath away.
And then you did more than you had ever imagined you could.
Temple needed to do more now than she had ever imagined she could.
Eventually the company noticed the lone figure stomping down the raked aisle. Their group gaze flicked away from their maestro to the distraction. Nobody ever interrupted a Danny Dove work session.