Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

“Sounds like you can’t live with one man’s religious values and the other’s man’s job.”

“I can’t live with liking, needing, wanting, loving two men at the same time!”

“A lot of women claim they can’t find one good guy nowadays. You have two. Can you spare one? I’m single.”

Temple, on the verge of tears, found herself laughing instead.

“Yeah,” Sue said. “I’m a fine one to give advice. Love isn’t for sissies. I think something will happen to push you one way or the other. It’ll just happen, and you’ll know what’s right.”

Temple nodded and got up to leave.

She had no doubt that Max was another one of Sue Hathaway’s “seriously sincere” persons too. Maybe the answer was not what she couldn’t live with—subdivided loyalties, conflicting love and lust—but what, or who, she couldn’t live without.

And maybe she’d recognize that when she saw it.

Police Work

Now that Temple was a bottle blonde, Morrie Alch was salt-and-pepper putty in her petite little hands.

She would bet that his only child, a grown daughter, had been a taffy-haired honey of twenty-two months at one time.

“Thanks, Detective Alch, for handling this so discreetly.”

He gazed up at the empty area above the peak of the exhibition ramp, where men in coveralls sat on boards suspended on paint-spattered ropes.

“Thank the New Millennium,” he said. “They have clout in this town. We poor flatfoots do our job and bow out.”

“You’re not a flatfoot; you’re a detective. You don’t fool me. That poor dead man. I’m still trying to find out if he could possibly have been hired by the hotel.”

“Waste of time. All that fuss about him maybe being a Chechen rebel. He has a Slavic look, but ‘Art’ was a petty crook. A hotel hanger-on, all right, but more used to hanging paper around town than hanging dead over the site-to-be of a priceless artifact. It takes a superior criminal mentality to engineer a major art heist.”

“I don’t doubt it.” Temple tried not to think of the superior criminal mentality she knew intimately. “We’ve tripled security.”

“That ought to make somebody very unhappy.”

“You think the exhibition is still endangered?”

Alch shook his grizzled head. “Security is out of our hands. Homicide’s the name of our game. The LVMPD will offer some officers to watch things around here, but it’s up to hotel security now. That’s the way they want it.”

Temple checked her watch. It was one of those easy-read dials big enough to cover her wrist. Nothing Paris Hilton would wear, but it kept her on time in a field where split seconds could make all the difference in the world.

Randy Wordsworth had arranged for her to interview the Cloaked Conjuror in his dressing room.

This was a biggie. The New Millennium kept the name of their headlining masked magician a state secret and his safety Job One. When you live and work in a magical kingdom where illusion adds up to a billion-dollar-a-month industry, your hide can become wall worthy when your whole shtick is outing the opposition. Death threats combined with the masked mystique to keep CC pretty much out of reach of the media, except for a few controlled appearances outside the New Millennium, like judging the TitaniCon science fiction costume contest at the Hilton Hotel a few months before, where Temple had first encountered him.

One of his body doubles had fallen to a suspicious death from the flies there, so CC’s security had tightened even more after that. But since Temple’s job here was partly spin control, management was letting her play sleuth in hopes she could head off more disastrous events spelling bad publicity. Temple was pleased to think that she was gaining a reputation for PI as well as PR work in Las Vegas. They made a useful combination.

She wasn’t surprised she had to sign in with a guard at the entrance to the backstage area. And to show her special New Millennium ID card. God, she hoped she could keep it when this job was through. Between her new blond bling look and the softening Glamour Shots effect of teeny tiny security card photos, she looked hardly as old as teen queen Hillary Duff. And thirty was already beginning to feel over the hill.

“You the one going to be working with CC?” the guard asked a bit shyly. He was the usual sedentary Social Security geezer who was content to watch the world go by, especially if it had good legs.

“Gosh, no!” Had he really mistaken her for Shangri-La, the lethal mistress of Asian illusions? Not so strange. “Shang” almost always wore makeup, so who knew what the woman really looked like? A handy asset. “I work PR for the hotel.”

He waved her onward, down some bare concrete steps into the significant bowels of the backstage area.

If Las Vegas shows were overly glitzy behemoths featuring casts of dozens and stage effects that mimicked natural catastrophes almost as well as a Spielberg flick, the underbelly that supported such overweight extravaganzas ran even deeper, wider, longer.