Despite all the tempting buttons waiting to be pushed, Temple felt like Alice in a high-tech Wonderland. No way was she going to touch anything here. Who knows? She might suddenly shrink or swell. Although any swelling inside this conspicuous consumption-mobile was likely to be of the ego variety, she thought, if one got used to rodding around in such elongated glory.
Speaking of which, the limo pulled smoothly out of the lot. The driver was remote behind a glass barrier Temple had no idea how to lower. The limo glided into an endless turn onto the side street.
Temple didn’t really look forward to meeting Amelia Wong, the feng shui darling of Wall Street. She kept running the proper pronunciation of the phrase in her head. Not Amelia Wong. That was child’s play. Feng Shui, though, was pronounced “fung shway.” Strange language, this mystical interior design dialect.
While the frantic suburban development around Las Vegas made it one of the fastest-expanding cities in the nation, the
Las Vegas Strip and environs were still as simple as pie: the Strip was one long, busy eight-lane street called Las Vegas Boulevard. It was lined with enough Fantasylands to make the late Walt Disney so jealous he was liable to go into premature cryogenic meltdown. And right next to the hotels, McCarran Airport. To thirty-some million annual visitors, that’s all Vegas was: the palm-greased skid from driver to bellman to dealer, from airport to hotel-casino to airport.
Temple never tired of gawking at the high-rise hotels and their various iconic towers along the Strip. The Paris’s Eiffel Tower. New York, New York’s Gotham skyline and Statue of Liberty. The MGM lion. The Luxor’s Sphinx…
She eyed one of the limo’s burlwood chests. Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum. She could use a bottled water, but didn’t dare
go hunting for it like one to the limousine born.
In minutes, anyway, the limo slowed to a stop in the executive terminal area of the airport.
Temple, who always aimed to be fast out of the starting gate, had to tap her clogs while the driver dismounted and walked the long, long way around his black steel steed to release her from the buggy section in back. Barging unaided out of a chauffeured limo seemed the height of low-brow anxiety.
Temple was aware that everyone stared as she emerged.
“Everyone” was only a couple of jeans-wearing mechanics, but it was more than enough to make her glad she had kept her
sunglasses on, like the ersatz starlet they took her for.
A sleek white baby jet was just taxiing toward them.
Temple boosted her tote bag onto her shoulder and turned with everyone else to watch its arrival. A welcoming party of three: one in Nine West, two in axle grease.
Here on the tarmac you could hear the engines whine down to a dying wheeze. You could feel the sand in your contact lenses and the vibration under your feet. (Even, in Temple’s case, through two inches of foam-enhanced platform shoe.) It felt like the days of early aviation.
Too bad, Temple thought, that Amelia Earhart wasn’t about to deplane.
The door behind the cockpit cracked open and fell toward the tarmac, its interior stairs resembling a stopped escalator People began pouring out: first men, then women.
Temple had memorized the names, rank, and suspected gender of the Wong party, but as they swarmed out like ants, all presumptions vanished from her mind.
The first woman helped out by the first two men to deplane caught herself up face-to-face with Temple.
Temple introduced herself, then added. “I’m doing local PR for the Maylords opening.”
“Baylee Harris.” The woman extended an unenthusiastic hand. “Ms. Wong’s personal assistant.”
Baylee. A girl. Okay. Tall, blond, and ultra-WASP. Next.
“Tiffany Yung.” Another assistant, this one a personal beautician. Definitely female. Also short, bespectacled, brunette, and Asian.
“Carl Osgaard.” Male. Tall, blond, and Scandinavian. What was he doing here? “Ms. Wong’s dietician and personal trainer.” Oh.
So far they were all in their late twenties to early thirties. Temple was relieved that she fell on the cusp of that. At least there would be no age gap.
“Pritchard Merriweather, Ms. Wong’s media liaison.” Tall, dark, handsome. A black woman with mucho presence. “I really don’t require a local media rep.” But not male, no way. In fact she was an archetypically female, first-person-possessive female! A bit like a tall, dark, and authoritative female homicide lieutenant Temple knew. And sometimes loathed.
“I actually represent Maylords,” Temple said. Mildly. “Kenny Maylord, the CEO of Maylords, will meet us at the TV studio for his joint appearance with Ms. Wong on Las Vegas Now!”
Feeling surrounded by two tall women, she lowered her voice and asked the only burning question on her mind. “What’s with the guys in Men’s Wearhouse suits and Matrix Reloaded sunglasses?”
Only Baylee deigned to answer her. “Death threats.”
Death threats? Temple eyed the sinister duo again. They made the ersatz mobster behind the Gangsters desk look as quaint as an antique pump organ.
How could advice on dressing your house for success earn death threats? From aggravated contractors forced to install fountains at the front door? That would run up the water bills in an arid climate like Las Vegas, sure, but feng shui had swept all the chichi world. Get over it.
“If you’d rather not ride with us-” Pritchard suggested hopefully.
“No problem.” Temple was dying to see how the burlwood trapdoors worked. “Death threats are old hat here in Las Vegas.
The cat’s fedora.”
Nobody got her last quip because they’d all swiveled to salute the queen bee. B as in bitch, it was reported.
At last she arrived, the brand name underwriting theflunkies: Amelia Wong, the woman who had made fashion, food, and home furnishings into a spiritual discipline, who had whipped simple domestic arts into a form of metaphysical and merchandising martial arts.
She was tiny. Tinier than Temple and Tiffany Yung. Bird boned, if that bird were a stainless-steel blue jay. Older than she looked, which was about forty. All spine, like a Victorian spinster. Gorgeous in that deceptively serene Asian way. Charming.
Like a cobra swaying before it strikes.
“What is that car?” she asked the moment she laid eyes on Temple, the native Las Vegan.
“The Chan.”
“Chan? What is this? An abbreviation of channel? Did that TV station send it?” “No. And yes.”
Crow-black eyes fixed on Temple. “You are being intentionally cryptic?’
“I am being intentionally precise. The limo’s name is not an abbreviation of ‘channel’ but a tribute to two great Asian film stars: Jackie Chan-”
Amelia Wong snorted. The Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz had said of her evil plans for Dorothy: “These
things must be done dellll-i-cately.” That is exactly how Amelia Wong snorted.
Temple went on. “-and the purely fictional, but immortal, Charlie Chan.”
“Rampant racist stereotyping.”
“But … ultraintelligent and charming, all the same.”
“Is that a compliment, Ms.-?” Ms. Wong glanced to her entourage.
“Barr,” Baylee supplied.
“Barr?”
Temple inclined her head. “A compliment is only as good as the spirit in which it is given … and taken.” “What is your birth sign?”
“Gemini in the Zodiac. I was born, however, in the year of the Tiger-”
“Ah. So. A creature of passion and daring, and the sign that wards off fire, thieves, and ghosts. You do not look like a
Tiger. I am expected someplace. No doubt.”