Pardon her! Temple didn’t usually let crass commercial words pass her lips at a funeral parlor. She was, however, intrigued to know that Wong had been mentoring Simon. Another reason for some competitive Maylords drudge to hate him.
Temple braced herself to approach the coffin. Who liked funerals? Never having lost anyone close to her, other than elderly relatives presumably relieved to escape their last illnesses, she never knew whether she preferred to see the dead person glorified by the undertaker’s art into a Glamour Photo effigy or just represented by a discreet photograph.
Each method was cold, intolerably cold, in its own way. Two kneelers, empty, were paired before a handsome casket surrounded by its sophisticated floral arrangements. The hard part was edging close enough to look into the coffin. Oh, my. Simon, beautiful in life, gorgeous in death. She felt a presence beside her. Danny.
” ‘Mine eyes dazzle; he died young,’ ” she murmured through the tears. She evoked one of the most striking lines in three thousand years of dramatic literature. Danny, showman that he always was, recognized the paraphrase immediately.
The line was from The Duchess of Malfi, John Webster’s dark seventeenth-century drama. Those six words had lived as a paean of utter grief into the twenty-first century, a tribute to premature death, to murderous death, to the death of the beloved.
Danny’s hand stole into hers. “He would have adored your eulogy. I’m sorry you had just met him.” “No, I hadn’t.”
Danny’s red-rimmed eyes met hers with surprise.
“I knew you, so I had always known Simon.”
He squeezed her hand, ebbed away in a haze of her own eyes’ making.
And through that haze, she made the same mistake that so many people at Maylords had: she saw Matt lying there like the noble young knight slain by monsters.
She turned away, as if she saw a ghost.
The ghost of her own emotions, and the ghost of her own ever-analyzing brain.
The pattern blurred and came into too-brief focus again. The reason for murder just eluded her, but it was there, thumping like a heartbeat under her skin.
If only she could cut loose from her own fears and expectations, she might make some headway.
The only way to guarantee that was to push her nosy way forward, searching for answers.
Finding the murderer wouldn’t help Simon, but it might console Danny and it sure as heck would overcome her own unreasonable, itchy fears for Matt’s safety, now and forever and ever. Amen.
Chapter 38
Pillow Talk
Once my Miss Temple is safely en route to her date with death, I head back to Maylords and my new undercover role as a stuffed toy. So I am once again lying there, hoping for enlightenment, but observing pretty much nothing, when I hear a shrill, lamentably human voice. It again appears to be directed at yours truly.
“Oh, my goodness! Look at that. Look at that, will you?” Well, I would, except that I am playing Statue.
“That is fabulous! That is so amazing. That is the best, absolutely best, soft-sculpture cat that I have ever seen. Do not you think so, Irma?”
Not again. Is there no end to my charisma? Yes, Irma, you do think so. You are not alone. But I am a rock, get it? I am an island. Get
off my naval chart! You will blow my cover!
“Where is a salesman? I must have a salesman. Look at this.”
Probing nails finger my ruff. My well-groomed, handsome ruff, I might add.
“Where is the tag? There is no tag.”
“Maybe,” Irma suggests in an uncertain voice, “it is on the rear.” No! Not again! Nothing is on the rear but the … er, rear.
“I cannot believe they would not tag such a perfect specimen.”
That is exactly what I felt during my serial unhappy interactions with the so-called animal shelter in this town, a.k.a. the city pound.
The name must have something to do with the disposability of a pound of flesh, and fur.
“I must have it.”
You are not the first female to feel that way, lady. “Where is the salesman?”
“Uh, Patsy. This lady here seems to want to help you.”
“Can you sell me this fabulous fake cat?”
“I cannot ‘sell’ you anything, madam. Maylords does not sell. Selling is vulgar. We ‘place’ exquisite objects with appreciative acquisitors.”
“Huh?”
I am with Irma. Huh indeed.
“There is no tag on this animal,” she says, quite accurately.
“Even I haven’t seen it out before. Probably some … inventive person slipped it into place without the proper paperwork.” “Can you fix it?’
“Of course. I will simply look this item up in the computer.” This item!?
“Thank you, Miss-?”
“Blanchard. Beth Blanchard.”
“Well, I must have it. Look at the quality of the faux fur. The expression! So utterly feline. So utterly … out of it. I cannot imagine why Maylords would not tag such an exquisite item.”
Exquisite item. Okay, that is more like it.
“You have to understand the Maylords way,” Beth Blanchard says. “Everything we have is exquisite. We have no need to ‘push’ product at a gullible public. We seek a clientele, like yourself, who has the taste to discover the superb palette of perfection we offer.”
Wow A superb palette of perfection. In midnight black. That is me. Especially when / am playing dead. Superbly.
“If you ladies will wait in the caf� I’ll look up this item’s SKU number and have the full particulars to you in a few minutes.”
They duly depart, leaving Miss Beth Blanchard staring at me. I have to keep my eyes open and motionless, of course, like taxidermy eyes.
“A cat-shaped pillow!” she mutters. “What bozo bought this tacky piece of junk?”
I brace for a fist pounding into me, which is what people like her do to furniture accessories they do not like. Luckily, Miss Beth Blanchard takes out her frustrations elsewhere. She enters the Art Deco vignette and moves Mr. Simon’s Ert� prints back the way they were before she rearranged them this morning.
Talk about obsessive-compulsive! She reminds me of a rat on a wheel running first one way, then the other. As if it much makes a difference in the daily rat race that is Maylords. I know one thing: here the rats are winning.
Chapter 39
Hunting Grounds
for Murder
Temple found herself feeling the opposite of what she had expected after Simon’s wake: eager to race back to Maylords and the arts council reception … and Beth Blanchard.
A knife in the back.
Other than the fact that this seemed general operating procedure at Maylords-oh, let her count the ways-she was thinking that this was a maddened woman’s method. This was up close and personal.
And Beth Blanchard was another one of those towering examples of womanhood nowadays, like Lieutenant Molina. She’d have the height, and the strength, to strike down hard at a man’s back.
Even to manhandle his dead body into a vehicle. Or … maybe she had help. Jerome Johnson had been suspiciously servile when taking her orders around the showroom. Maybe he had to be. Or maybe Jerome had done it. Why? Well, he certainly was oversensitive about Temple’s nonrelationship with Matt Devine. And Matt had indicated Jerome had uncomfortable ideas (from Matt’s literally straitlaced view) about himself.
Maybe Jerome had mistaken Simon for Matt from the back and … whammo.
Because there was Matt, associated not with one but two of the few women who worked for Maylords: Janice and Temple
herself.
Hadn’t they all had terrifying recent evidence of how lethal a crush gone wrong could be?
But mostly Temple liked Beth Blanchard for Simon’s murder. She was a Bad Attitude walking. Temple could easily see
that temper getting the better of her.
Still, that didn’t explain the frightening shooting attack the night of the opening. Was it coincidence? A Wong-motivated international terrorist attack on the one hand, maybe involving hmmm, foreign trade, the Chinese tongs. If so, where did the overthe-top bikers harassing her come from? A local revue? The Good Ship Lollipop? Everything was so disparate. Guns and gays, media icons like Amelia and Danny, feuding low-level employees like Jerome and Beth. And in-house sexual harassment by both genders, for Beth had been after Simon.