That evening was Thursday, end of the week-long event schedule. Temple found Team Wong fully accounted for in the atrium and ready to rock ‘n’ roll.
Free-standing fountains tinkled like bladder-challenged poodles in a circle around the outré orange Cadillac. Somehow Temple couldn’t picture someone singing “Orange Cadillac.” But she could picture Clint Eastwood in a movie of that name. He was definitely not a pink kind of guy.
Tonight was the night. Amelia Wong would draw from the huge Plexiglas barrel that contained the names of every last soul who had visited during Maylords’ opening week and had lusted after the prize Murano, now turned, like a pumpkin into a carriage, into an orange Cadillac.
Temple eyed the low-riding luxury sedan with relief, glad the compromised Murano was gone. She would never have cared to own such a big, high vehicle even before it had housed Simon’s dead body.
Maybe the mood of the country was growing less pugnacious and obvious.
Maybe her mood was appreciating the quiet versus the obvious.
Matt versus Max?
Why was she thinking like this? She was on her own here. Neither man was on the premises. Only the notion of them. Which was more than enough for her.
They were all here:
The Maylords “über management couple. Kenny and Barb.”
The thinning ranks of hot-shot (literally) decorators (already the predicted personnel slaughter had begun). Which meant the mass of suspect disgruntled ex-employees had swelled.
Amelia Wong and her now-familiar minions.
Jerome, still looking whipped despite the loss of his personal crown of thorns.
Janice, arms crossed as if she were daring the evening to be interesting.
A suite of potential Maylords clients, all middle-aged and prosperous looking, but not Steve Wynn level.
Chef Song, alert at the buffet table with his ultrasharp cleaver cocked in the crook of his white-coated arm.
And Danny Dove, pale and terse, but all business, as a choreographer-turned-inside-man should be. He’d played a key role in tonight’s setup, and Temple wanted him to witness the denouement he deserved.
Temple nodded imperceptibly at Song and Wong. Both had risen to the occasion and buried the hatchet (or cleaver) in service of the common good.
She was careful not to acknowledge Danny, but his presence reassured her about the informal, even secret, safety precautions she’d put into place. Dancers were artists with rhythm, you know. She knew.
She didn’t see Rafi Nadir anywhere, but . . . at the rear, back and center, stood her angels with dirty faces: the Fontana brothers in almond-pale suits with a really butch five days’ growth of beard. White chocolate with a discreet drizzle of dark, to mean business: the beards and the invisible Berettas, of course.
Tonight the huge Plexiglas drum would turn . . . and turn. Hundreds, even thousands of hopefully-filled-out contest entry forms would tumble in a spin-dry cycle of luck.
Until Amelia Wong reached in a French-manicured hand and pulled out a plum. A winning entry. Then the orange Cadillac would have a home and all the hoopla and homicide at Maylords would be over.
Or would it?
This was her final night as Maylords’s Las Vegas PR rep. Temple was dressed to kill, but her handy Colt was still in police custody. Like they needed more firepower.
New Age music with an Asian accent wafted from the sound system, Enya in Mandarin. The delicate scent of freesias reminded Temple of . . . yes, a funeral parlor.
While the Wong party and Maylords brass lined up for the usual unimaginative shots for the newspaper society pages, Temple edged as quietly as she could in high heels down the beige travertine road.
Her weight was on the balls of her feet. She glimpsed her passing self in lacquered ebony cabinet doors, in glints of mirror, on polished brass.
No one else was moving among the maze of model rooms, dimly lit with accent lights for the evening. Everything looked like home, if you’d spent $40,000 per room.
Temple moved along, her soles scraping ever so softly on the polished stone floor. There were rumors of ghosts. Some of the departing employees hadn’t been forced out by discovering Maylord’s hidden cut-and-slash method of management; some had been unnerved by the two murders on the premises and quit.
Temple knew she would see Beth Blanchard’s body spinning as idly as a soft-sculpture mobile for a long, long time in her nightmares.
She gazed at the hanging art, so oddly static in its usual places now that Beth’s nervous, commanding energy was gone, now that she didn’t need to endlessly undo others’ good work simply to put her own stamp on the whole place.
She had been an obnoxious woman, so much more eminently kill-able than the likable Simon Foster. Yet something linked the two murders, Temple was convinced.
No one would kill the sweetest guy and the sourest woman on the staff just because . . . because sweet and sour was a Chinese condiment.
And Amelia Wong had something to do with it. What a murderous triangle: A gay man and two presumably straight women, one an uppity employee, the other a media diva. Surely the murderer made it a quadrangle. But who?
Temple couldn’t even hear the echo of the droning speeches now. She was deep within the Maylords maze.
Her steps faltered.
Something pale moved in one of the vignettes.
Temple stepped onto the cut-plush wool of a model room carpet to muffle her steps. She edged into the slim cover of a pillar of pooled velvet draping the four-poster bed.
As her eyes adapted to the low mood lighting she saw a pale-suited man moving in Simon Foster’s Art Deco vignette. Moving and . . . moving pictures.
It was . . . Simon Foster. The casually perfect highlighted and styled hair, the impeccably cut suit. A ghost in Gucci, moving Erté prints from one position to another. Over and over again, as if perpetually restoring what Beth Blanchard had wrought, over and over again.
She held her breath.
His arms raised as if worshiping something unseen. The Erté glided down onto its hook and held. The next one was hung. He stepped back, presenting a well-tailored suit back of featherweight wool blend with Italian double vents at the sides. Maybe not Gucci. Maybe Zegna. Still expensive.
And then the man again approached the false wall, lifted his arms and took down one print, then another. And switched their places. Over and over again.
His movements mimicked an automaton. Down, back. Up, switched. Step back. View. Pick up and change. A strange eerie box waltz with the dead. With dead intentions. Change and restoration, like the seasons. Death and rebirth.
Temple was too mesmerized by it to move.
Someone else wasn’t.
Another pale figure suddenly bloomed in the vignette. One moment it wasn’t there, in another it was.
Its pale arm was raising too. Just one. It needed to do nothing as symmetrical as lift a framed print from a hook. It was poised for a downstroke. This arm was armed. Something dark and thin glinted in one pale fist at the end of one pale sleeve.
Ghosts were murdering ghosts?
Temple’s muscles tightened as she prepared to test dream with reality.
But another pale suited figure multiplied in the dark vignette. And another. Another. A gaggle of ghosts.
Temple’s fingers tightened on the top of her weapon-empty evening bag. Her role was decreed. Witness.
She heard grunts, explosive breaths muttering four-letter words.
“Got the bastard,” someone muttered behind her.
She turned. It was Rafi Nadir, staring toward the scene as tensely as she was.
“It’ll be your capture,” she said. “I’m the witness.”
“That oughta fry Her Lieutenant Highness’s kneecaps. Okay. Confess. Who is it?”
“I think we can move in. He looks pretty unconscious.”
“I figure one of those freaky Fontana brothers knows the Vulcan neck pinch, is what I think.”
Another pale-suited figure vaulted into view, then joined them in gingerly approaching the scene of the almost-crime.
Danny Dove.
“Who is it?” he said. “I want to know who it is.”
“I’m with you, brother,” Rafi said. “I don’t like being downsized to backup.”
“Amen.” Danny sounded grimmer than he ever had. “But it’s probably just as well for my future liberty.”
Temple, flanked by her Odd Couple of attendants, was as deeply curious. She’d figured out why, but not who. Although she had her suspicions.
The plethora of pale suits so typical in sunny Las Vegas confused matters in this ill-lit pseudoroom.
One Erté print hung on the wall. The other leaned against it.
On the floor a crowd of bent backs held someone down.
“Simon” stood alone, upright, watching.
He turned to face the oncoming trio. The pinpoint spotlight meant to illuminate an Erté print edged his face.
“It’s all right,” Matt told Temple the moment he picked her face out of the crowd, which was almost instantly. “He never got near me.”
A bent back straightened and turned.
“Are we not sheer lightning in Gucci loafers, Miss Temple?” Aldo asked. Or Eduardo. Or Ralph.
“Slicker than a yellow raincoat,” she said. “So who is buried under Mount Fontana?”
Danny’s hand on her elbow tensed. He’d insisted on being here for the “kill,” even if it was a metaphoric one.
The brothers stepped aside as two of their number dredged up their half-swooning “catch.”
By the wrinkled linen suit ye shall know them.
Ainsworth the manager! Temple thought in triumph. A thoroughly dislikable but likely candidate. “Where’s the weapon?”
A Fontana brother pulled a latex glove from an abnormally flat side suitcoat pocket and dove for and then flourished a decorative pewter letter opener. Temple recognized the Chinese character hilt. Maylords must have bought and laid out a dozen of the things for the Wong week of events.
“Baggie,” he ordered. Several brothers whipped out lunch-size plastic bags from which he selected with great care, depositing the weapon within.
“Operation over,” another brother pronounced. “Who gets the capture credit?”
Rafi stepped forward. “I do.”
For a mad, mad moment, Temple imagined a wedding ceremony including Molina. But she didn’t have time for surreal dreams. She found herself edging forward to peer at the captive. The height was right, the build, even the hair. But this wasn’t Ainsworth. This was his literal evil twin.
By now Janice had edged into the picture, standing next to Matt. God, he looked great!
Temple refocused on the exceedingly less great-looking Ainsworth clone.
Fifty pounds overweight, dressed and coifed to imitate, done up to pass unnoticed in Maylords, to be avoided even, like the micromanaging Ainsworth. A makeover, as Matt was for the murdered Simon, thanks to Danny’s sleight of hand. How that must have hurt.
“What’s going on?” a whiny voice queried petulantly from behind them all.
Will the real Mark Ainsworth please stand up?
The eyes that had turned to regard him were now all coming to rest on Temple.
She considered the captive, his head hung as low as possible to hide his features. But she didn’t need a road map now; she had found the destination. It was a dead end, in fact.
Two dead ends.
“This is the guy. He murdered Beth Blanchard at least, and maybe Simon. Take it away, Raf.”
The words had the effect of inviting Jackie Gleason to consort with chorus girls. Nadir stepped forward to clamp the poor man’s Ainsworth into his custody.
Temple weighed her cell phone in her hand, ready to speed dial Molina herself. She really deserved this collar. And Temple really deserved to see Rafi hand over the perp to Molina personally.
Instead, Temple thought a little longer. If the criminal events at Maylords—high-powered rifle attack, two murders, and a drug bust—were to fit together nicely in a box for the LVMPD, some fancy ribbon tying was needed to gift-wrap the package.
Temple was good at ribbon-cutting events. Maybe she had even more to offer in the ribbon-tying department.
And she knew she had to present a fully wrapped package to turn the media coverage into a positive instead of a negative.
There was no getting away from the fact that Maylords had been the scene of some major-league evil deeds. But if it could be shown at the same time that Maylords itself, and its employees, i.e., her, solved their own mess . . . it would make the survivors heroes instead of idiots.
So far her plans had proved productive. But, she hoped, the best was yet to come, the Sting of Stings. All she needed was Redford and Newman, and, heck, Matt was a pretty good Redford substitute. Max wasn’t Newman, by any means. Newman was too medium cool for Max. But he’d done a pretty good Mel Gibson imitation with the motorcycle. . . .
Whatever, she wanted Simon, and Danny, to rest easy with a job well done. Her job. So much more than mere public relations. Some good people had gone down and some not-so-good people would have to answer for it.
If all went well. And why wouldn’t it. She was a primo events manager, wasn’t she? Call her Nemesis, wired.
Temple holstered her cell phone and set about doing what she did best: arranging successful public events. Even when they revealed very private motives.
So half an hour later Temple stood demurely on the sidelines while Amelia Wong stuck her Prada-suited arm into the open door of the Lucite drum and plucked forth a plain white folded sheet of paper, origami for the wagering set.
Temple, Matt, Danny, and the Fontana boys hovered hear the inner circle, watching for a winner.
“And the winner of the 2004 Cadillac is . . .”
Amelia Wong was oblivious to the lurking further revelations.
“The winner of the car is Jerome. Jerome Johnson. Is he here?”
A roar went up. TV cameras focused on Amelia Wong with Ken and Barb Maylord beaming behind her.
“He’s an employee!” a voice protested from the crowd.
“Employees were eligible for the drawing,” Barb Maylord said. Firmly. “We at Maylords,” she added, “are as delighted to see our hardworking employees do well as we are our customers.”
“Put that lie in your crack pipe and smoke it,” Rafi muttered behind Temple.
Jerome had to be pushed forward by his fellow workers into the glare of TV lights. Even then he gawked at the shining car, afraid to approach it. The scene was dying.
A dapper figure from the crowd vaulted to the driver’s side door. “Call me Vanna White,” Danny Dove said, flourishing open the car door like a valet.
The crowd laughed and applauded in recognition of a Las Vegas superstar.
Jerome had no option but to take the offered driver’s seat, almost blushing with surprise.
Temple sensed Matt standing behind her. “That’s . . . such poetic justice,” she said.
“Poor Jerome. He’ll make a capitalistic materialist yet.”
Temple turned slightly. “What did Danny do to you?”
“I suspect I’m the product of the Las Vegas edition of ‘Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.’ I never knew it would hurt to be hip. Bleach burns, did you know that?”
“Yeah, and waxing stings. You’ve seen that show on cable?”
“No, I’ve just heard about it. Does a redo make that much of a difference?”
“Subtle but significant. Don’t you feel it?”
“Do I feel pretty? I feel foolish. But in a good cause.”
“Does Michelangelo’s David need a final polish? I guess we all can use one. This was just the right touch, though, supplying the ‘ghost’ of Simon to bring our psycho killer out of the shadows.”
“Danny’s job is to make people over, into great dancers usually. In this case, the remodeling was tragically personal. I feel most weird about impersonating someone’s dear departed, yet it gave him closure, I think. A bizarre feeling, to have a fairy godfather, you know?”
“I bet. But making Danny a part of this did him a lot of good, don’t you think?”
“Changing me to evoke Simon was touch and go. Maybe it allowed him to design a living memorial.”
Matt and Temple watched Danny work the floor to bring off the evening’s event with panache. His energy made Jerome’s modest diffidence into an asset for the cameras, not a problem.
Matt nodded, seeing the same dynamic. “Jerome badly needed to win something. I guess it was worth getting my hair streaked. You know any quick way to get that out?”
Temple smiled. “Just go with it. It’ll wash out in time.”
“Washed in the blood of the lamb.” Matt looked very serious. “Surface and substance. It’s hard to separate them sometimes, isn’t it?”
“Always. Especially in this case.”
Matt wanted to work it out. “Like Beth Blanchard being so petty as to rearrange other designers’ furniture? Just a cover for a deeper motive. Or Danny Dove playing the ever-eccentric gay choreographer. It’s just a cover for being different from the norm, and the norm often ends up being abnormally cruel, or hypocritical, or greedy.”
Temple shrugged. “It’s so hard to judge. Maybe we should let a jury do it.”
“Juries are us.”