Temple had been dying to remain glued to the orange leather sofa, interrogating Janice Flanders while pretending to make small talk.
Why was Matt here, of all places? Because he was with Janice, obviously. Hadn’t Molina mentioned that he was seeing Janice? Temple couldn’t remember, but then so much had happened lately.
“It’s been ages. Where have you been hiding yourself?”
Speaking of small talk, Danny Dove expertly tossed it over his shoulder to Temple while weaving an elegant path through the crowds. He kept her hand in custody and therefore, Temple in tow.
“Haven’t had any show-biz related projects lately,” Temple said. “I’ve never seen anybody cut a faster wake through a mob than this.”
“Hate crowds, except onstage,” Danny explained, finally leading her into an Art Deco vignette that made her want to redo her whole place right away.
“Here we are,” Danny said.
And there was indeed a “we” here.
A pudgy, short, red-faced man in a wrinkled, oatmeal-colored linen suit was gesticulating like a manic mime at a slim, tall man wearing a suit the same silky color and texture as Baileys Irish Cream.
It was like watching Oliver Hardy berating Bond, James Bond, the Roger Moore incarnation.
They turned, actors noticing an audience.
“I’m done,” the short man said . . . shortly. He favored Temple with a particularly venomous look, then left.
“Who is Grumpy, Dopey, and Pissed Off all put together?” Danny asked.
“The manager of the whole enchilada,” the other man answered.
He was one of those guys so dreamily handsome that the savvy woman figured out he was gay before she allowed her heart to skip a beat or her hormones to rev their engines.
“This is my partner, Simon Foster,” Danny said. He drew Temple forward to introduce them with such beaming pleasure that each instantly knew the other was too important to dismiss on mere sexual preference grounds.
Temple looked past the gorgeous suit, the hair, the eyes to a smart and slightly diffident personality.
“You’re the crime-fighting PR woman,” Simon said.
“Oh, Lord.” Temple laughed. “Danny’s been casting me in some musical in his mind again. Freelance PR Superwoman. It’s just that I sometimes run across crooks.”
“Don’t we all?” Simon smiled and sighed at the same time.
“What’s your gig?” Temple asked.
“Gig? Isn’t she the little trouper?” Danny asked rhetorically. “Simon is an interior designer.”
“I’ve been freelance until now,” Simon added. “The lure of Maylords was a regular paycheck, but I’ll still be able to work with my previous client list, and hopefully expand.”
Temple read the underlying message obvious in both Janice and Simon’s presence on the staff of Maylords. Times were tough. The Clinton budget overage had morphed into the Bush megadeficit. Free spirits everywhere were hitching their stars to any steady job they could find.
“Did you design this room?” Temple asked.
When Simon nodded Temple shook her head in awe. “You’ve just convinced me to jettison my whole decor and go into deep debt.”
“Maybe a little debt,” Simon answered. He glanced around, his laugh lines reversing course into a frown. “Gawd, that woman has been at my Erté prints again.”
“Janice?” Temple asked.
“Janice? Hardly. She’s got an eye Erté would’ve envied. It’s that Blanchard witch who thinks she’s curator-in-chief around here. Ignorant slut.”
Simon exchanged the positions of two chrome-framed prints of elegantly attired women. The vignette gained a dynamic that had been missing before.
Temple was startled to notice how much Simon resembled Matt when his back was turned, if Matt had ever been dressed or coifed spectacularly enough to turn heads.
“Amateurs!” Danny shook out his French cuffs with a dancer’s disdainful grace. “Everybody’s an artist in his or her own mind, and/or a critic.”
“It does sometimes seem the world of personalities veers between two poles,” Temple agreed, “the positives and the negatives.” She turned back to Simon. “It must be terrific fun to play with a string of fantasy rooms, like an ever-changing set design.”
“Or a dollhouse for adults. I wanted to put mannequins into mine, but Ainsworth, the general manager you just saw leaving, nixed that. Each designer does two or three vignettes from scratch, but management has the final say. And sometimes would-be management, like large Miss Blanchard.” Simon frowned at the fall of a drape and adjusted it. “The rest of the room settings are fairly stock arrangements meant to showcase certain lines of furniture.”
“Mannequins are a great idea!” Temple always waxed indignant to hear a creative notion quashed. “This is Las Vegas. Anything goes. Say . . . if ‘management’ found mannequins too hard-edged, how about soft-sculpture people? They’d be more subtle. Do I know a source for that!”
Even Danny, who thrived on pushing real people around makebelieve settings, perked up at the suggestion. “Who’s your source? I could choreograph a fabulous number mixing soft-sculpture people with real dancers.”
“My landlady at the Circle Ritz, Electra Lark, is the queen of creative soft-sculpture crowds. She fills the pews in her wedding chapel with them, even Elvis.”
“The Circle Ritz!” Simon’s face lit up like Kleig lights spotlighting Fred Astaire in a ’30s musical. “What a post-Art Deco ’50s hoot! I love driving by that round building. And you live there?”
“Me and my faithful feline companion, Midnight Louie. So does Matt Devine, who’s here tonight. Danny’s met him.”
“Any openings?” Danny asked, catching Circle Ritz fever. “We’d love a pied-à-terre closer to the Strip.”
“Electra would know. I’ll check with her.” Temple was glad the subject of her cool digs had distracted Simon from the crushing of design ideas. This was Maylords’s opening night and her PR party. Everybody should be happy, at least for the evening.
“I’d better mingle and make sure everything’s going well,” she said, suddenly sorry for lapsing into two personal conversations while on duty.
She hurried back onto the pale cream travertine road, feeling a little like Dorothy en route to the wizard. She should ensure that the Maylords brass was happy with the event.
Being congenitally short, despite the Midnight Louie black-cat heels sparkling on her feet, Temple searched for recognizable hair, feeling rather like a scalp hunter.
Amelia Wong’s shiny black bob, with its intimations of ’20s femme fatale film stars like Louise Brooks, was a low-profile constant, a mobile, lacquered mushroom cap. Taller heads orbited her like heavenly bodies, some of them literally so, such as the equally statuesque blond Baylee and black Pritchard. Not to mention the X-Files alien-FBI types in opaque black shades.
Mark Ainsworth, the dorky, unimaginative manager, had a greasy, curly poll of dishwater brown. Kenny, Maylords’s CEO, second generation and just past thirty, wore a Walter Mondale tonsorial chop job that screamed “midwestern” in a trendy international town like Las Vegas.
Temple was so busy hunting hair she didn’t notice someone marking her out from the milling herd, although she was probably the only fast-moving person without a bent elbow holding a wineglass in the place.
Temple’s eyes paged past a knot of people, then froze and paged back.
Oh, vaulting Vladimir Kagans! That Iranian-secret-police guy in a navy suit fit for a funeral wearing a name tag reading “Joe.” That was someone she knew, who did not know her, thank God. What was C. R. Molina’s ex-squeeze Rafi Nadir doing here, and why was he passing as “Joe”?
What was he ever doing anywhere? Security work to hear him tell it, a.k.a. stalking to anyone who knew what nasty crimes he was suspected of.
And now he was walking toward her, black eyes narrowed like a hunting hawk’s.
Temple tried to pretend she hadn’t noticed him. As she turned to veer in the opposite direction, though, he somehow ended up as a roadblock. She had to stop—or careen into him. And physical contact with Molina’s bad-apple ex-cop SO was to be avoided at all costs.
The so-called Joe was still staring at her. “I know you.”
“No, you don’t.” She tried to weave past but he held up a hand. She stopped rather than crash into it chest first.
This was the only man she had ever seen put the fear of the Lord into her own intrepid SO, Max Kinsella. And Max was a pro at skullduggery and derring-do. Temple was just a gifted amateur.
“I know you.” Nadir stared at her face, and glanced down to take her measure.
He was the creepiest guy she’d ever met, a cross between the mad guru Jim Jones, who’d poisoned all his followers in Guyana three decades ago, and Qaddafi. He had that same dark Mideastern handsomeness that age was melting into the face of a corpse laid out for viewing, something once good gone terribly wrong.
Molina had told Max, reluctantly, that Nadir was a rogue L.A. cop driven off the force. It took some doing to be driven off the L.A. force, from what Temple had heard. But Nadir had been turning up in all the wrong places in Las Vegas lately. That was especially bad news for Molina, who had hoped she and their daughter, Mariah, had vanished from his life years ago, before he even knew he had a daughter.
Nadir’s forefinger pointed at Temple’s naked face like a gun barrel. “Starts with a T.”
“What?” Temple’s icky thoughts had scared her into a distracted state.
“Your name.”
How could he know her name? She had crossed paths with him when she was investigating the clubs in search of the Stripper Killer, but that guy had been caught—trying to abduct Temple—when she had laid him low with her pepper spray. Sure, Nadir had come on the scene and decked the guy after, but she had been wearing a long brown wig that, thankfully, had stayed firmly pinned on during the entire incident.
And she’d used a pseudonym in the clubs, posing as a seller of lingerie to strip off.
“Tess!” he said. “Tess the Thong Girl.”
Temple glanced around to see if any of her temporary bosses were within hearing distance. She’d thought that undercover persona of hers was safely history, along with the armful of stripper unitards that she sold by the spandex yard at the clubs while hunting the Stripper Killer. So had anyone heard this revealing challenge? Thankfully, no. Worryingly, no.
“That’s who you are,” he said. “I never forget a face, even if the hair over it changes.”
Temple decided to embrace the moment. “Yeah, but that’s not who I really am.”
“Who are you, then?”
She realized she did not, absolutely not, want to give him her real name.
“Well, I wasn’t who you thought I was.”
“I get that.” He looked around. “This looks like your kind of crowd, the upscale pricks and princesses who live the chichi life.”
“Oh, no, I’m just a working girl.” Wrong phrase.“I mean, an ordinary Jill who works for a living. I’m a . . . secretary. Sort of.”
“What were you doing in the clubs, then?”
“It’s true, what I told you then. Sort of. My sister was involved. She danced a little and, with the Stripper Killer loose, I was worried about her.”
He nodded, coming to the conclusion she’d desperately been implying. “So you got the crazy idea of going undercover in the clubs? If you hadn’t been carrying that pepper spray, babe, you’da been strangled with your own spandex unitards.”
“Hey, you know what they’re called. That’s pretty impressive.”
“I spend a lot of time in the clubs, doing security.”
“You did come along just in time to save my skin.”
“Yeah.” When he smiled his face lost some of its sinister cast. “What were you thinkin’? Little girl like you takin’ on the Stripper Killer. You went right over and sat with me before that. I was a strange guy. You ought to be more careful.”
Yes, Temple had risked a lot to sit down and try to pump Rafi Nadir. He was the only man to instill fear in both Max and their bête noir in blue, figuratively speaking, homicide lieutenant C.R. Molina, who were the two most formidable people Temple knew. One she loved, the other she loathed. Not hard to say which was which!
“Anyway,” Rafi was saying, “you look a little harried. I guess they have you running your ass all over the place on opening night. You deserve a rest. Why don’t you sit down on this, uh”—he stared at an ostrich-pattern ottoman shaped like a giant mushroom—“leather thing and I’ll get you a glass of wine. Red or white?”
“Ah . . . white. Please. Thank you. Joe.”
“My name’s really Rafi. This is just a cover.” His thumb and forefinger flicked the name tag, dismissive. “They call me Raf.”
“Thanks. Raf.”
Temple sat as directed, no longer harried, or worried, but amazed.
When opportunity falls into your lap, and comes bearing free wine in a plastic glass . . . you’d better play along and learn something.
“Won’t they miss you?” she asked when Rafi returned with the proper-colored wine.
“Nah. Tonight the security’s for show. What they’re really worried about happens when things are quieter.”
“Really? What?”
“Can’t talk about that. So. What’s a nervy little secretary like you doing with a stripper for a sister?”
“It happens in the best of families.”
“I did security for a lot of the clubs. Would I know her?”
“Maybe, but’s she’s back in Wisconsin now. That killer scare made her finally go home and make peace with the folks.”
He nodded. “Usually you can’t go home again, someone said. I sure can’t. Strippers don’t often make it. You must be a good example. Anybody cared enough about me to risk her neck in a strip club with a killer at large, I’d be real grateful. You’re a ballsy little broad.”
Temple tried hard not to blush at such heartfelt praise. All three words set her teeth on edge, although she did sort of cotton to “ballsy.” Wait’ll she told Max.
Then again, maybe she wouldn’t tell Max that she was Rafi Nadir’s new poster girl.
“You know,” he went on, waving his hand at the crowd, “I can’t sit down, by the way. Duty—but, you know, it’s real hard to turn a stripper around. When I was a cop, you’d try to get them to testify on something, or report a DV, and they just wouldn’t do it.”
“DV?”
“Domestic violence. That’s why I burned out on police work. It was a losing battle, and even your fellow officers and the brass couldn’t do any good.”
Well! Rafi Nadir as a misunderstood knight in blue? It was just possible, Temple thought. She never liked to believe the Gospel according to Molina, and according to Molina, Nadir was a brute worth keeping away from twelve-year-old Mariah even at the cost of her mother’s career.
Poles. Positive and negative. His truth and her truth. Both possibly right, and right about each other?
“So why’d you leave police work?” Temple, the ex-TV reporter, asked. “Burnout I can understand. But it must have been something more.”
Rafi surveyed the crowd, more to avoid looking her in the eye than for surveillance purposes, Temple guessed.
“I had a partner. Not a job partner, a personal one. She, uh, was the right gender and the right minority. Went up like a helium balloon. I was the wrong minority and the wrong gender. I got sick of the hypocrisy. I left.”
“The job or the significant other?”
“Both.” He looked back at her. Shrugged. “I helped her at first. Built her confidence, clued her in. Didn’t see it coming. Then it was Hasta la vista, baby. She split so fast and so totally I couldn’t even find her to ask why.”
Temple didn’t like the raw edge in Raf’s voice. It was angry and it was honest. He said. She said. The same old story, quest for love and glory. As time goes by. He was Bogart; Molina was Bergman. Not! Temple had an overactive theatrical imagination. She’d be the first to admit it.
“But that’s bygones,” Rafi said, smiling.
Smiling at her!
“You got an address?”
No, she lived under a Dumpster! Now what, ballsy little broad? she asked her nervier self.
Now Matt Devine to the rescue.
He had eased onto the scene like Cool Hand Luke. “Sorry to interrupt,” he told Temple, nodding impersonally at Nadir. “Some ceremony at the central atrium where the car is. They need you.”
Temple jumped up. “Sorry,” she told Rafi. “Gotta run.”
His lips tightened, his expression saying thanks for reminding him that he was just scummy hired help and had no business talking to a woman whose life he had saved.
“I enjoyed talking to you,” Temple said in farewell.
And she had. She had really enjoyed learning that the Molina scenario might have another side.
Still, she was glad to go off with Matt.
“Who was that guy?” he was asking as suspiciously as Max would. “He sure was monopolizing you.”
“Do they really want me anywhere?”
“Yeah.” Matt stopped now that Rafi Nadir was three vignettes behind them and out of sight. “I do. Here.”
“Really.” Temple wondered what a genuine ballsy little broad would say to a provocative statement like that.