Kit nodded, then took off her jazzy metallic-framed glasses to rub her eyes.
"Don't you do this," she warned Temple. "Rubbing is bound to give you premature bags under the eyes. Will knock you right out of parts you're too old for. But I am burnt out. All those tiny little numbers to read and dial, and not a bit of useful information."
"You still think like a professional actress, Auntie. You can always have your author photo digitally retouched, so who cares how many bags you have?"
"I do," her aunt said so sharply that the dozing Louie beside Temple growled.
Kit growled right back, then redonned her glasses to scan the disorganized book's contents.
"I might have to take up the stage again," she added. "What with the publishing fallout."
"There's a publishing fallout?"
"Yes. Kind of like the Age of Aquarius for book people. Major realignment of all the communication media to see what form of word and picture will survive the millennium. Why? You plan on breaking into publishing anytime soon?"
"No . . . but I have a friend who might have a book to market soon."
"Fiction?"
"No. Expose, I guess."
"Of anybody famous?"
"No. Only slightly notorious."
"Notorious is almost as good as famous these days. A notorious former Vegas mobster, perhaps? I'm available to ghostwrite the right project."
"No gangsters. Just. . . international terrorism."
"Wow." Kit took off her glasses again to rest her eyes, which looked only reasonably baggy for her age. "Any chance you'll name names? Subject? Writer?"
Temple shook her head. "I shouldn't have mentioned it."
"Probably not. Get my hopes up, will you? I'd hate being a detective! This is so boring and it got us nowhere."
"You say you know every employment agency in New York that would handle holiday Santas?"
"Well, the ones worth knowing about. There may be some outfit down in the Bowery . . ."
Temple stroked Louie's satin ears. "Then we know something. The dead Santa wasn't hired through a legitimate agency."
"Colby, Janos and Renaldi wouldn't know of any other kind of agency. They are big time, Temple. A major agency in this town, and that is something to crow from the chimney tops."
"Chimney. A fatal chimney. A fake, fatal chimney. What a bizarre way to kill somebody! Why that way?"
"It's dramatic."
"Life is not a cabaret, Kit, contrary to the song. Most killers don't look for an innovative way out that would thrill the heart of the Bard of Avon, or even Andrew Lloyd Webber. The last thing a killer wants is a murder that calls attention to itself."
"Why not? Maybe that was the point. I certainly wouldn't push someone I wanted to kill in front of a cab. So ... shoddy and unimaginative. Nobody would ever suspect anything, especially with the traffic in New York. And look at this scenario. It's perfect. A roomful of witnesses, nobody near the body, the whole thing concealed behind painted bricks. It's like a magic show. Except that at the end of an act, the corpse would jump up and we'd all shout, 'It's alive!' "
Temple sat forward, causing Louie to slide into the space at her back. "But he did jump up, didn't he? The supposed corpse, I mean? He wasn't dead. He made a dramatic resurrection in front of everybody."
"Colby, you mean."
Temple nodded. "I'm beginning to wonder about Louie's behavior too."
"You should." Kit's narrowed eyes drilled through the sleeping cat's Rubenesque form.
"He's so perceptive," Temple said. "When I think about it, he was remarkably friendly to the Santa Claus we found in the empty conference room. I thought he had dashed in there on some quirky feline mission, but now I wonder."
"You think Louie knew someone was in there?"
"Probably. I sensed some movement, and he's a cat. Cats survive by sensing movement. But I think it was more than that."
"More than cat and mouse?"
"I think that Louie knew the guy in the Santa suit too."
"Louie knew him! Right. Our chief witness is a cat. An out-of-town cat, whose chief experience of Manhattan is being toted to and fro in a purple parachute. Who would Louie know in the Big Apple?"
Temple was stumped. "Only you."
"On-ly youuuuu," Kit crooned back, trouper that she was. "Only . . . rouuuuuu."
"Rouuu? Oh. Rouuuu-dy! Your friend who answered the door. No!"
"Maybe he saw Mommy kissing Santa Claus."
"You mean, at the advertising agency. He . . . saw something he shouldn't have when he came early for the gig, and got killed for it?"
Kit was paging through her address book, her agile fingers scattering slips of paper right and left like huge snowflakes. "Shiii-shi-ite. Rudy doesn't have a phone listing. Can't afford a phone."
"Can't afford a phone, in New York? That's like being deaf and blind in Macy's."
Kit nodded solemnly. "Poor Rudy. That's why we all helped him. He had some dump farther down in the East Village, where it hasn't become fashionable yet. A rent-controlled place he qualified for years ago." Kit shut her book, like a Bible she had suddenly realized was a bad translation. "A lot of people live like that in New York. On the verge. The edge. You never notice them, until they die."
"Rudy is not dead, Kit! He was a Macy's Santa just a couple nights ago. High-profile Santas like that don't go jelly-belly up. They come back to ho-ho-ho again. Have you got a street address on him?"
"Yeah, but it's no place you and I would care to go after dark."
"We'll bring Louie. People seem to give me a wide berth when I'm loaded with Louie." Temple held out a hand. "The book, please."
The cab driver kept wanting to take them to Houston--not pro-nounced Hue-ston, like the very big city in Texas, but House-ton, like the very bad street in New York City.
Temple knew enough to quail at the street name, but Kit was implacable. She repeated the address, and ended up directing the cabby.
The street the cab stopped on was narrow, shadowed, empty, lined with tall trucks and scary as hell.
The cab driver managed to convey that he was loath to leave the ladies off here, even though he did not speak English.
Temple worried when a New York City cab driver had an attack of conscience about letting a passenger off.
They exited the vehicle, the driver begging and pleading with them until they broached the building's iron-railed door.
No security system was in place to make entrance difficult.
Kit breezed in ahead of Temple, her long faux-fur coat brushing the peeling woodwork.
"Sixth floor," she said with brio, marching over a carpet of smashed trash to a paint-pocked metal elevator door scratched with incomprehensible obscenities.
"Kit--"
"Hush. In New York, attitude is everything."
The lobby felt as icy as the outside air. Temple clutched Louie to her bosom in his carrier, glad to have some concealed weapons nearby even if they were only claws.
When the elevator creaked open the scarred outer doors, an odor of cat box nearly knocked them off their feet. Actually, the odor was not cat box, but--Louie forgive her!--it was better to think of it as an animal odor rather than human.
Kit swept onto the putrid car like a czarina in sable and pushed the button for the sixth floor with the tip of her leather glove.
Her head was high.
"Think of England, dear," she advised.
"Why the Hades should I think of England when I'm in the heart of Hell's Kitchen or someplace? I will think of. . . Boys' Town."
"Spencer Tracy," Kit said soothingly. "In a Roman collar."
"A blond Spencer Tracy in a Roman collar," Temple corrected as the rickety elevator lurched upward with suspicious fits and starts.