“Except Purple Cows,” Temple said innocently.
Natalie’s unplucked brows clashed above her nose like broadswords.
“It’s fine for you girly little things to think you can slide through life on your looks without any moral or social conscience. Some of us aspire to more than easy money and the attentions of”—she glared at the Fontana brother handing her tote bag back with a small bow and a big smile—“gigolos!”
Temple and Armando watched her depart, driving those porn-film high soles into the marble floor like flatirons.
“It was a pleasure,” he mused, “to pick the pocketbook of such an unpleasant female undetected. We will have video in fifteen minutes in your conference room. Julio will fetch a chilled bottle of Asti Spumanti for your viewing pleasure.”
“It’s only 10:00 A.M. I don’t need wine.”
“But we do. It really is necessary to rinse the taste of that unhappy woman out of our mouths.”
In the conference room, Temple’s tote bag awaited her atop the long conference table opposite the dead-body-long television that had descended from the ceiling.
A DVD player sat like a centerpiece at the exact middle of the long table. Temple wasn’t even going to ask what it had taken to extract and copy the media in Natalie’s hidden camera, and then replace it as if nothing had transpired, but technical boxes of unknown abilities crouched along the sideboard.
The four Fontanas active in the operation took seats along either side of the conference table, one using a remote to darken the lights and start the player.
Immediately the buzzing chaos of the convention-goers filled the room. Snatches of conversation. Laughter. The footage had a film verite feeling.
The screen was filled with deep purple. Then the camera’s eye zoomed out to reveal the very large purple butt of a woman bending over a wheeled canvas bag.
The camera roved at hip level, zooming in on swollen ankles in laced-edged red anklets, then swooping up to creased and folded middle-age faces wearing blobs of red and purple on lips and eyelids.
“You look darling!” a female voice caroled as the camera closed in on another, decidedly not-darling close-up of an unsuspecting woman.
“Jeesh,” a Fontana murmured, “this is character assassination.”
Temple nodded in the dark. “She’s using a fish-eye lens to distort their faces and bodies. Natalie’s pretty good at operating that tote-bag camera blind. She must have done a lot of this.”
“What’s the point?” Eduardo asked. “She’s getting paid to film the convention.”
“As I suspected, her real agenda is mocking it. Paid to undermine. Nice work if you can get it. I bet she’s done this before. Time to ask the Internet to cough up any references on her.”
“If she’s using her real name.”
Temple glanced at Eduardo. “She’s been a stringer for national news magazines, and I hear that’s her married name. And she doesn’t care how angry the Red Hat Sisterhood is, organizationally or individually, once she’s got what she wants in the can, or on the DVD, rather. Amazing how technology is outdating all our expressions.”
When the recording had run its course, Temple refused a glass of wine, but lifted her water glass in their honor. “To the Fontana brothers. Long may they wave.”
“Cin-cin,” said Armando, pronouncing the Italian toast “Chin-chin.”
“Salud,” said Eduardo in turn, using another romance language, Spanish.
“Prosit,” said Emilio, resorting to German.
“And Skoal,” finished Ralph, going Nordic.
“L’chayim,” Temple finished in Yiddish, saluting life with her water glass, hoping they’d recorded a clue to untimely death with this session.
Temple eyed her co-conspirators for one last toast in English. “To the Red Hat Sisterhood! Your inspection line not only may remove a murderer hiding in their midst, but it was a high point of the day for all the women I overheard raving about their time in the ‘Guy Line.’ “
“Those,” Eduardo said, obviously leaving Natalie Newman out, “were charming ladies. They have a zest for life that is quite Italian.”
“We will have the proper equipment delivered to your Circle Ritz domicile so that you can see both recordings completely.”
“Thanks, but I think I know what’s she up to now. About six-three with those shoes.”
“Those are knockoff Versace,” Eduardo sniffed, opening the double doors to release Temple back into the noisy flood of P and R adherents. “Just as she is a fake.”
Chapter 52
Ms. Apprehension
Temple returned to the lobby to be greeted by a shrill, Hitchcockian film scream. Before she could triangulate on the direction it came from, she saw the flock of Fontana brothers behind her racing past, cell phones glued to their ears.
She spun on a resale Jimmy Choo spike heel and trailed them through a crowd of excited, muttering women that gave way as the Fontanas charged past.
What the women muttered wasn’t encouraging.
“Another murder—!”
“Strangled.”
“Boa?”
“No, scarf.”
“Are those guys hot! D’you think they’re undercover cops?”
By then Temple was weaving in and out of the gathered conventioneers, trying desperately to catch up to the Fontanas.
The crowd around the entrance to the Hatorium Emporium was particularly thick. Temple found herself using elbows and heels to pick her way through, leaving a chorus of ows in her wake.
“It’s another Pink Hat,” someone cried.
Her own pink hat got several tugs.
“Don’t go in there!”
“It’s death to Pink Hatters.”
Someone swiped the hat off her head, but Temple snatched it back and carried it.
No way the police would be on-scene for this latest attack. She and the Fontana brothers were the first responders. Maybe they’d catch the perp.
Suddenly she’d caught up with them, but they were a ring holding everyone back.
“Ernesto!” she asked the first one whose attention she could snag. “What’s happened?”
Their expressions were as grim as death, their locked jaws and forbidding arms braced to hold back the mob.
Even her.
Especially her.
“You don’t wanta rush in,” Ernesto warned. “Aldo’s there.” Aldo? Well, of course, if they were all on red alert. He would be there. He was the eldest. He was .. .
Temple’s heart and jaw dropped in concert.
“A Pink Hatter?”
“She needs air,” Ernesto said gruffly as Temple strained to see past him.
She could hear sirens screaming down the hotel driveway again.
“K-Kit?”
“Coming out,” someone shouted with such authority that the babbling mob fell back.
Ernesto swept Temple out of the way, holding her close to some really great Italian tailoring covering a body of steel. Aldo raced past, carrying Kit swagged in his arms like a doll, her arms swinging with the motion, her soft strawberry-red hair bare.
“You won’t want to be a Pink Lady anymore,” Ernesto muttered.
“She’s—?”
“Alive, but someone sure tried to change that.”
Armando raced past, carrying a pink hat and purple scarf with red flowers on it.
“That scarf design sold out,” Temple told the Fontana brother who was providing her spine at the moment, choking on the words. “They were all gone. I got the last one. I’m storing it in the conference room.”
“We’ll see if you still have it there,” Ernesto suggested ominously. “But first, we’ve got a hospital run to make.”
Temple was swept out of there almost as limply as Kit, thrown into the front seat of a black Viper, just one in a train of the powerful sport cars.
With a roar like an Indy 500 race, a cortege of Vipers shot out from under the Crystal Phoenix porte cochere.
They caught up to the ambulance in no time, but Temple was too woozy and worried to notice how’d they’d managed to weave through the clogged Strip traffic at 4:00 P.M.