Temple hobbled after, Nostradamus taking her elbow, for all the good that gesture did her.
Outside they found Electra Lark, her hands lifted so sky high that her muumuu had hiked up well beyond the dimples in her knees. Given the landlady's Technicolor dress and her lime and pink sprayed hair, it wasn't hard to notice that her face was Liquid-Paper white.
Maybe the source of Electra's shock was the shiny black Beretta that matched the screaming Viper so nicely. The semiautomatic fit Ralph Fontana's fine Italian hand like a steel gauntlet and was pointed straight at the turquoise bird-of-paradise on Electra's muumuu.
"I was only . . . petting the fender," Electra said in a gush, "when the dang thing started yammering. I barely touched it."
"Better be the truth." Ralph bolstered his firearm and settled his jacket into smooth lines again. "Better not have a fingerprint on it. That's a fresh, hand wash-job, lady. This baby's been buffed by genuine shimmy cloth."
Temple refrained from telling Ralph that chamois was pronounced "shammy," not like something a topless dancer does.
As Ralph came around the hood to examine the street side fender, Electra, hands still raised on high, edged around the car's rear until she stood on the sidewalk with Temple and Nostradamus.
"I barely brushed it," she complained again.
Ralph silenced the alarm system with a punch on the remote control, then bent deeply over the fender for a close inspection.
"The alarm is set on super-sensitive," he muttered with satisfaction. ''Look wrong at this baby and you're siren-meat. This is Fontana brother property. Look, and lust, but don't touch."
Electra examined the speaker and made a face that Ralph was too intent to see.
''Well, excuse me for window-shopping." She turned to Temple, finally lowering her limbs.
Armfuls of garish titanium bracelets jangled from forearms to wrists like the rings of Saturn coming in for a landing. "You okay, dear?" She eyed Nostradamus with more mother-hen suspicion.
Temple nodded, weary of such high doses of solicitude. "Nostradamus came here to discuss business, and Ralph drove me home from the Phoenix. I admit that I could use a little peace and quiet, though."
"You shall have it." Electra appropriated Temple's elbow to guide her back inside. "We shall all have it when the nasty man with the noisy car departs."
Ralph, squinting into the dazzling, dark mirror of the Viper's sun-warmed fender, heard nothing.
Nostradamus topped his balding head with the straw fedora and tipped its brim to the two women vanishing into the Circle Ritz. He looked well satisfied.
****************
Temple was waiting--feet wisely shod in tennis shoes, tote bag loaded for bear over her left shoulder--in the Circle Ritz lobby less than twenty-four hours later.
In the interval, she had taken a long, hot bath, followed by a long, cold application of ice to her ankle while she read her way through one-twenty-second of Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale.
Temple kept an always-mean-to-read-someday shelf of eclectic books, most of which she never got to. Helprin's lyrical yet epic fairy tale bewildered but bewitched her, and totally made her forget Fontana brothers, police officers and Crawford Buchanan, which was a sizable achievement.
In the morning she cut her toenails, another always-mean-to-get-to chore, did her nails, and read the paper with Midnight Louie.
Reading the paper with Midnight Louie meant that she opened a section wide in preparation to concentrating on a story. Then Louie walked across the paper and her lap. He finally settled in a large, lumpish mass on her thighs, the paper betwixt them, so that he was comfy and she could not read, move, or even breathe. She could not, in fact, do anything but stroke his glossy, Viper-black fur until he purred like a hive of bees.
When her legs were asleep to the hip and the paper was crushed beyond legibility, Louie would yawn, stretch, rise and go elsewhere. Often his farewell leap would leave a prick of braced hind claws in her thighs as he vaulted away. Sometimes, Temple thought, a cat was not unlike a live-in lover who left suddenly.
Despite Louie, or perhaps because of his inadvertent numbness therapy. Temple's ankle felt almost normal in the morning. The swelling was down, and by noon she was itching to return to the scene of the crime. Maybe this mysterious car that was to waft her to Temple Bar wouldn't show up, she thought hopefully as she buckled on her oversize watch.
Once a watch was on her wrist, she was ready to simmer, cook, parboil and rock and roll.
She was no longer chilling out at home, she was primed to do business.
So she paced, despite her ankle, waiting to go down to the lobby. There she would consult some old guy about a Lake Mead restaurant at an obscure site that coincidentally bore her name, minus a terminal "r."
When she rode down in the rickety elevator, every clack and clank seemed to chide her for deserting the action at the Crystal Phoenix. Why had she agreed to this bizarre side trip, other than the fact that a freelance PR person always can use another client and she had been eager to disarm Ralph, the human Doberman, who seemed ready to rend the flesh of any harmless being who crossed her path?
But maybe Ralph was right, Temple thought in the deserted lobby. She was about to ride--
with a stranger--to meet a strange man somewhere she had never been, on business she wasn't sure of. Maybe the police were right, too, heaven forbid. Maybe she was dangerous to somebody. Maybe that somebody would stop at nothing to stop her. Nostradamus could be an innocent shill, thinking he was acting for this Spuds Lonnigan. It could all be a--famous phrase from detective stories--a set-up, with her as the patsy. Well, she didn't play the patsy for anyone.
A cranky car engine idled outside. A heavy-metal door slammed. A shadowed figure was framed by the doorway, the blazing afternoon sunlight etching only a shapeless silhouette.
Temple braced her feet and clutched her tote to her torso, six pounds of shoulder-numbing sandbag.
The door whooshed open, admitting a shaft of heat that sliced the Circle Ritz's tepid coolness like a warm knife dissecting a stick of butter.
Temple cursed herself for being too trusting.
"Hi," said the newcomer's familiar, desert twang. "I'm your chauffeur to Temple Bar."
Temple baby stepped over the sleek marble floor until she was close enough to see features.
"Jill? Jill Diamond?"
"Yup. I'll run you out and back. A drive in the desert will be fun. Hope you don't mind a ragtop."
Boy, did Temple feel silly. Jill Diamond was almost smaller than she was.
And the vehicle that waited at the curb was almost smaller than the Storm, but not quite.
Jill's unlikely set of wheels was an ancient Jeep, painted a baby-blue that sand and sun had buffed by to a muted, matte finish like a beloved pair of time-faded blue jeans.
Temple climbed gingerly into the rough-and-ready vehicle. The seat was about as upholstered as a rock. Jill did equally rough-and-ready things with the stick shift, and the Jeep jolted into motion. Temple felt rather like someone riding a baby-blue bucking bronco. She jammed sunglasses onto her nose and dug for the sun-screen in her tote bag as the Jeep sputtered onto the Strip, then onto the highway.
Wind rushed by as if late for somewhere. Talk seemed too much trouble. Beside Temple, Jill's braids whipped behind her like pennants, while she squinted into the distance without benefit of such sissy accessories as sunglasses, aiming the Jeep for the farthest wrinkle of the horizon.
Steel-gray highway, blue sky and sage-green land streaked by. Mauvish mountains ringed the horizon like the jagged edge of tomorrow, a distant barrier to keep the pinball of the Jeep from shooting right off the map into Maybesville.
Temple laughed suddenly.
Leaping lizards, but a change of scenery . . . and locomotion . . . was exhilarating.