"Are you counseling me again?"
He shook his head. "Warning you. It's not easy. Compared to this, checking out Rafael Hernandez was a snap."
Matt held his breath. "That's what you came to tell me?"
"He's clean, Matt. I used my contacts from twenty-five years ago, I used computers. I even used some pull in the various dioceses. Nothing. Not a word of scandal or complaint. I interviewed several ex-altar boys by phone. Hernandez can be a bit severe, even a little pompous, but misconduct--never."
"You're absolutely sure?"
"Certain enough to stand up in a court of law and swear that I was unable to unearth a scintilla of evidence."
When Matt said nothing, Frank pulled out another cigarette and lit it in disgust. "What do you want, Devine, a chorus of archangels announcing the news from on high? I did my best, and I'm satisfied. Why can't you be?"
"Sorry, Frank. I appreciate the favor. It's just that the price of being wrong is so high."
"It always is, we just don't notice it in every case."
"So." Matt bent to pull his canvas shoes on dry feet. "Now you can concentrate on what really brought you to Las Vegas." He shrugged on a shirt that still clung damply to his shoulder blades.
"Hinting? I'm not about to talk about that. Seal of the professional," he punned with one of his rare flashes of humor as he stood with Matt.
"I'll walk you to your car. Maybe you could leave your phone number."
''Sure." Frank pulled out a card, scrawling his home number on the reverse with a ballpoint pen. "I travel a lot, but messages reach me everywhere. You have any questions, call. If you don't, let me know how you're doing. I'm curious to see what you end up doing,"
''Professionally or personally?"
"Both." He-opened the wooden gate to the parking area.
Matt tucked the card in his shirt pocket, spying Frank's car right away. A rental Taurus, forest green. Perfect for a priest, or an FBI man. He began to see the logic of Frank's new profession.
Pulling up next to Frank's authoritatively nondescript car was Temple's lurid little Storm.
He watched her car absently, thinking about what he and Frank had discussed.
Frank was opening his car door when Temple came clicking around behind it, grocery bag in one arm, tote bag on her opposite shoulder, oversize prescription sunglasses slipping down her narrow, upturned nose.
"Hi," she began, then glanced at Frank and stopped cold.
"What are you doing here. Miss Barr?" Frank's recent affability had hardened into alertness.
"I could ask the same of you. I live here."
"Do you?" Frank turned to Matt with surprise, as if wondering why Matt hadn't volunteered this fascinating fact. "You know each other?"
Matt was momentarily tongue-tied. More was going on here than the obvious. How did Frank know Temple? Had he been checking on Matt?
"We're neighbors," Temple said into the growing conversational gap. "Matt teaches me martial arts."
"Are you trying to say we shouldn't worry about your safety. Miss Barr?"
"I'm trying to explain how Matt arid I know each other, although I don't know why." She shifted the bag. "I've got some frozen yogurt. I'd better get inside."
The paper bag was slowly slipping down her hip.
"I'll get it." Matt said. He turned to Frank. "Thanks for stopping by.''
Frank was eyeing the grocery bag in Matt's arm, then Temple, speculation running visibly wild.
"We'll talk again," he told Matt. He nodded at Temple in a way that was not quite farewell, got in the car and drove away.
"Well." Temple was eyeing Matt with equal curiosity. '*How do you know FBI Agent Bucek?"
"I went to school with him." Matt didn't feel like unreeling chapter and verse of the connection at the moment. ''And you?"
''He's the government goon who interrogated me along with Molina and Ferarro, the homicide twins from the LVMPD." She preceded him to the wooden gate, and pulled it open for him. "Hey, just kidding about the 'government goon' part. He was perfectly polite, but I got the impression he can be formidable when he needs to know something."
"He can."
"Sounds like the voice of experience, and isn't he a little old to be in your class?"
"I didn't say we were in the same class, just at the same school."
"Curiouser and cursiouser." Temple clattered into the building ahead of him.
Matt could feel the condensation on the frozen yogurt carton seeping through the brown paper, softening it to pulp. It wasn't the only thing that was sweating.
They were silent in the elevator, both facing forward as if the cubicle was crowded and they were on their best, most indifferent behavior.
"Matt," Temple said suddenly. "Did you hire Eightball O'Rourke to protect me?"
Chapter 29
A Ghost of a Chance
Temple surveyed her new home away from home. The first pair of high heels she had been able to wear in days sank past their plastic heel caps into plush carpeting the color of cafe au lait.
Beige grasscloth wallpaper was interwoven with silver strands. A computer screen cursor winked encouragingly from a neatly petite laptop floating on an otherwise empty sheet of inch-thick glass. A laser printer in the same ivory-color casing rested atop a nearby cart.
Against the wall, a row of walnut-veneer two-drawer file cabinets awaited the opportunity to conceal any clutter that Temple could generate.
Atop one file cabinet, steaming discreetly, sat a black coffee mug emblazoned with the gilded, feathered form of a rising phoenix.
Temple peeked into the cup. She had asked Van's secretary (male, but not a Fontana brother) to bring her coffee with milk.
Yup, the mixture within perfectly matched the color of the carpeting.
Temple sighed wistfully at her magnificent blank slate of an office. She would make it the clutter capital of America in a just day or two, she thought, unloading the essential contents of her tote bag onto the glass desktop.
She owed her elegant roost at the Crystal Phoenix to two people. Danny Dove had insisted that Temple rewrite the absent Crawford Buchanan's "abysmal scripts,'' his phrase, not hers, in front of Van von Rhine. And Van von Rhine, in turn, had insisted that Temple needed an office in which to master mind the Crystal Phoenix resurgence, as well as any little promotional project she might dream up for "dear Spuds"-- Van's phrase, not Temple's-- "and his offbeat lakefront fast-food emporium."
Temple suspected that the office served another, "unspoken purpose. It would help everyone at the Phoenix keep an eye on her, since she was the suspected target of the mischief now abroad. She frowned, remembering how Matt, hot, bothered and indignant, had denied any intention to protect her, other than by teaching her martial arts. He had not denied hiring Eightball O'Rourke. Interesting.
''All right," Temple told her gorgeous but empty office. "As long as I'm being kept after class for my own good, I might as well do a little homework."
She hit the intercom button on the desk, jumping when a disembodied masculine voice answered. For all she knew, a Fontana brother could now be manning the outer office. Or Crawford Buchanan.
''Could you find out if Van has the Crystal Phoenix renovation blueprints? I want to see a set."
"Yes, Ma'am," the young man, who answered to Yancy, replied. "Be right back."
Temple's coffee had barely cooled to drinking temperature when a light knock resonated on her door.
At her invitation, Yancy entered, bearing armfuls of rolled architectural drawings. They tumbled to the desk, like blue-blooded bones. Temple uncurled one, anchoring one corner with her coffee cup, another with a china dish of paperclips. They were the only possible paperweights in the sleek office.
Sighing, she took off one red leather Margaret Jerrold pump, then another, and laid them across the remaining two corners.
She had seen architects renderings before, but she had never tried to interpret them. She broke a nail while excavating her tote bag for her glasses case.