Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

People wearing latex gloves were laying a plastic drop sheet beneath him. The inevitably paint-spattered step ladders were being brought in, their aluminum feet shod in plastic baggies so as not to contaminate the drop cloth.

Temple couldn’t help shivering in the 72-degree air-conditioning that chills every Las Vegas venue.

“He’s the only one in this room who can’t hurt you. He’s thoroughly dead,” observed a dry, slightly accented voice behind her.

Temple turned, glancing up, as she usually had to. Surprise! The woman was her size, maybe only two or three inches taller. Temple was wearing her three-inch corporate pumps and this woman wore—Temple always checked shoes after faces—snub-toed Mary Jane ultra flats. With a strap across the instep. Not evoking all-American Mary Jane but . . . Detective Merry Su. Yet this wasn’t the same woman.

The face was way more interesting than the footwear.

Pale but unfreckled; unlike Temple’s, the eyes boysenberry dark in a pasty oval cameo of a face—rice powder, maybe? Eyelids and eyebrows tilted up at a sharp angle, with the epicanthic single eyelid of Asian physiognomy. Oh. Temple’s earlier shiver hardened into an overall alert; she froze against allowing all motion. She could guess who this was.

The woman wore a fluttery off-white chiffon top and handkerchief-hemmed skirt, her white tights stark against the black satin Minnie Mouse flats, a disingenuous Alice in Wonderland look. Dull black hair was pulled back hard from her face into a ponytail as coarse and lavish as a show horse’s.

Could Temple be gazing not on beauty bare, but on the bare face of that almost mythic, duplicitous illusionist and ring thief and CC’s new partner in magic, Shangri-La? Yes.

Temple thought her heart had stopped and restarted about three times, but it might have been four. Or five. This was the mysterious enemy to all things Temple: Max, Louie, Tiffany opal-and-diamond engagement rings. Ring, solo.

“Temple Barr,” CC was saying by way of introduction. “She’s doing PR for the hotel on our new show. This is my petite performing partner, Shangri-La, less formally known as Shang.”

Temple nodded to acknowledge the introduction. Shang nodded with almost deliberately clichéd Asian inscrutability.

What an actress! Temple thought. Could the woman have failed to recognize her? Shangri-La had stood next to Temple onstage, then had conjured the ring off her finger, pushed her into an onstage box and down a dark rabbit hole into a coffinlike box ready for transport and who knew what else?

Surely she didn’t forget a victim.

Oh, wait! Temple was still a flagrant bottle blonde from her last assignment, not a natural redhead. It threw off her most intimate friends, particularly the male ones. Why not a woman?

“Nice to meet you,” Temple said, happy that the woman was disinclined to thrust a saber-nailed hand at her for shaking. “You’re quite right that this poor man couldn’t hurt anyone now, if he had ever wanted to. But he can hurt the public profile of this exhibition.”

“Bad publicity is the best kind nowadays,” Shang said, eyeing the hanged man.

They all stood around staring, like crowds come to see an execution in the bad old days of public hangings.

“We must embrace such facts,” Shang added, looking up into CC’s stoic mask. “And you and I must triple check our equipment once the authorities have freed the scene.”

“Any notion of who he might be?” Temple asked, knowing the answer but wondering if they did.

“Nobody,” Shang said coolly. “Nobody having anything to do with our performance. Just a supernumerary. An extra.”

Temple quelled another shiver.

CC moved off in the custody of his much smaller partner, like a mastiff dominated by a terrier.

Temple had to admit that it had occurred to her more than once that Shangri-La, that down-scale lady magician in extravagant Asian theatrical face paint and razor-slashed hair and kimonos, might have been a secondary persona of Kitty the Cutter.

Having met the lady wearing what was as close as she might ever get to civvies, no way was she a Black Irish super-patriot and stalker. That woman was well and truly dead, and no one mourned her. Except maybe Max, in the temple of his heated adolescent memory and forgiving Catholic soul.

Temple. She’d thought she was that for a while, with him. A permanent refuge from the international war of terror and counterterror going way back before 9-11.

“Get these civilians out of here,” a new voice ordered.

Temple shivered again.

Just who spoke this time, she didn’t have to guess.

Temple turned. It was her red-letter day for unhappy encounters.

“Ah, Miss Temple Barr,” the voice continued. “I took you for a chorus bimbo from the back.”

“They’re usually your height, not mine, human giraffes almost six feet tall.”

“True.” Lieutenant C. R. Molina was tall, dark, and semi-female. She was also not a friend, although sometimes an associate. “I see you’re keeping Zoe Chloe alive.”

“Do you have any idea how hard a bleach job is to undo?”