"I'm old-fashioned," Electra confessed. "I married all of my husbands."
"All?" Kit was shocked.
Electra nodded demurely. "Let's watch the rehearsal, girls. Isn't that what we're here for?"
They sank back into their seats in unison, but Electra's question lingered in Temple's eternal inner monologue.
What were they themselves here for? Kit was the professional. A writer, imagine that. Her aunt the romance novelist. To Kit this pageant was a mere promotional circus, and the men on stage were the attractive animal acts that lured the public to buy her popcorn.
Electra was the ardent amateur, a reader yearning to break into print. She saw these rather overwhelming men as symbols of lost youth and late-life renewal.
Temple was an escapee from reality. Along for the ride, evading the angst at home, dodging her personal responsibilities. Fleeing to an environment she barely understood, and wasn't sure she liked or even approved of.
Women frankly ogling men as a role reversal had a certain kinky appeal, but was as silly and immature as men ogling women. And, at the moment, Temple wasn't in the mood for either option. Had Hamlet showed up instead of Danny Dove, and barked "Get thee to a nunnery," she might have gone, gratefully.
Kit, actress-author extraordinaire, gestured to the proscenium. "This is set up more like a fashion runway."
Temple nodded as she examined the temporary tongue of stage covered in garish red cloth with cellophane blades like trampled grass, sticking out at the audience in tacky audacity.
Onstage, Danny's hands were slapping out amazingly loud claps.
"Attention, Romper Roommates. You all have your order of appearance, God bless us, everyone.
Walk it on down, one by one, and show me the shtick you came in with. Then I'll give you something that works. Go!"
They came down the runway, as obedient as lambs who would be lions. Shoulder blade-long manes streamed (though some men were post-Delilah Samsons, conventionally shorn); sculpted muscles flexed in four-four time in shoulders, thighs and washboard stomachs (though some were less muscle-bound than others); all flashed bleached-to-bone-white teeth (though any audience was absent except for Temple and associates, and a mixed-sex cadre of stage crew and costume volunteers).
"Oooh!" Electra exclaimed as one candidate performed several handstands down the runway The next produced a wavy dagger with a jeweled hilt, then held it pointing floorward between his legs as he executed a slow split, letting the metal blade suggestively lift skyward as his riven thighs neared full contact with the stage.
"Whew!" Kit fanned herself with one hand. "A night at the Laddie's Lair."
A roguish sort with short curly hair sashayed downstage, a workman's leather tool belt clattering around his hips like a gun belt. At the runway's very tip he took a wide stance, then drew a metal measuring tape from its center-hung housing in the twelve o'clock low position.
"Danny Dove is right," Temple muttered. "Everybody has a gimmick."
"Just like the strippers in 'Gypsy,' " Kit agreed, rising. "I've got to visit the ladies' room. Let no hunk do anything he shouldn't do before I get back." She bustled up the aisle.
Onstage, Danny Dove had collapsed into a cross-legged position at stage right, rubbing his corrugated forehead with his hands. His dancer's eloquent body conveyed what words did not: the contestants' preplanned shticks were as corny as anticipated.
"What a disappointment." Electra spoke loudly enough to carry to the stage apron, just as Mr.
Tape Measure's nine extended inches snapped back into its holster. "I mean... I expected more, more savoir faire."
"More dash and less trash," Temple said. "I hope Cheyenne doesn't embarrass himself, though I shudder to imagine what the Fontana Boys will come up with."
Electra nodded bleakly. "Kit isn't missing anything."
"Maybe we can sneak out discreetly," Temple suggested, rising.
"Imagine, a front-row preview parade of Incredible Hunks and we're bored. Let's catch Kit coming out of the ladies' room."
A lull in the lineup of male pulchritude created a perfect escape hatch. Temple and Electra were tip-toeing rather ostentatiously up the plush-carpeted aisle when rustles and whispers erupted behind them.
Yell bloody murder and no one will look. Whisper a little and they'll stand transfixed. The two turned to the stage just as a bare leg thrust out from behind the side curtain.
It was well-formed, and hairy enough to be masculine, but also decidedly equine.
Temple raised an auburn eyebrow.
Another leg--or, rather, foreleg--followed.
Edging nervously onstage was a horse of mottled gray color daubed with white, an Appaloosa famed for the pale scatter of melting "snow" spots on its hindquarters.
But no one in the audience could see its hindquarters yet, and who would even worry about it, given the tawny, sinewy, naked male figure of an Indian--Native American, in politically correct terms--on its back?
"Well!" Electra stopped so sharply Temple caromed off her suddenly solid form. "Wait. I once considered using an Indian hero in my romance entry. Wish I'd seen this guy sooner. This is more like it."
"It's theater, all right," Temple agreed, watching horse and rider amble downstage. "Will that makeshift ramp hold a near-ton of horseflesh and hunk?"
Each hoof struck stage with the muffled thump of a drumbeat. Though the rider looked naked, Temple soon spotted the thongs over each hip that supported a buckskin loincloth. The brave's long dark hair was braided in front, and no smile fractured his chiseled features. A small deerskin pouch on a leather string lay on his bare breastbone. The leather strap slashing diagonally across his well-developed chest led the eye to a beaded quiver and three feather-tipped arrows peeking over his right shoulder. He carried a pale bow of antler or bone, with a two-foot-long arrow notched on the string, though his arms were slowly lowering the weapon as the horse moved toward the audience.
Very sensible, Temple approved. Safety before sensation.
The horse paused at center stage. It wore no bridle, Temple realized, no reins, no saddle, but was trained to respond to rider signals only. What a magnificent creature! she thought, although most (less romantically burned-out) women would apply that praise to the rider rather than the ridden.
The horse held its noble position for long seconds, then turned its head over its shoulder and whinnied inquiringly. Temple didn't know much about horses and whinnies, but she knew a lot about greenhorn performers wondering 'what next,' whether in plain English or plaintive horse.
The rider did nothing. Did not so much as move.
Good call; his stoic bearing added to the mystery and the moment. Cheyenne--for Cheyenne it was--had created a show-stopper. Even Danny Dove sat immobile and rapt, captivated by a true stage suspense as everyone present was, by a breathless wondering What will he -- they -- do next?
"Bravo," Temple whispered under her breath. "But don't milk it too long--"
Even as she spoke the rider moved. The warrior's lean torso shifted left, as if to dismount, the bare left leg slid sideways along the horse's gray belly, the bow and arrow pointed downward, to the floor. Every motion was as elegant as ballet, blessed with a lingering; sure sensuality that only intensified the effect. The onlooker didn't want the slow-motion poetry of man and horse to end, but knew that--at any instant--the moccasined feet would spring lightly to the stage, for the horse couldn't walk on the temporary runway.
But the anticipated dismount didn't happen. Instead, the man's body kept tipping sideways, like a tin figure struck by a lucky shot at a shooting gallery. Temple expected such a figure to flip upright and move on. It didn't.
Cheyenne's feet touched the stage floor only an instant before his entire length did, collapsing like a straw man. Bow and arrow fell to one side.
Everyone watched, motionless, waiting for the drama's next act. Surely something not yet seen would explain this turn of events.
Temple saw the unthinkable rea
son first.
"No!" she shouted at someone, spurred to action, wanting to roll the film backwards. She sprinted down the long aisle and up the five or six steps to the runway.
Every eye wrenched to her. She could sense annoyance on the accusing faces of watching stage crew members in the wings. But she had her glasses on, all the better to see the heroes on parade strut their stuff. She had spotted something else in the spotlit glare ... something other than naked horse and nearly naked man.
Blood dappling the snow of an Apaloosa's hindquarters.
No one--nothing--was moving but her and the gently sidestepping horse, except time. The horse whinnied again, this time in obvious distress. It minced away, as magnificently bare as its fallen rider, turning to display a thin crimson stream that meandered down the sleek, swelling belly.
Now everyone was running for the same spot, but Temple was already there. She paused at the foot of Cheyenne's figure, studying his open, unseeing eye, his slack mouth. Then she saw the feathered haft of an arrow bracing his back, keeping it from sinking flat to the floor.
Or was he sinking to the floor, driving the shaft in deeper?
Temple knelt to seize his ebbing shoulder with both hands.
"Help me! We've got to keep him from falling on it--"
Someone crouched beside her. "Hang on, dear heart!" Danny Dove.
Even greater force checked the body's fall. A Fontana brother knelt at Cheyenne's head, his bent knee helping prop up the torso.
Temple sensed legs crowding around them.
"Lay him forward," someone suggested.
"Has he got a pulse?" Another voice.
"I've done some nursing--" A man knelt beside them, then pressed two fingers to Cheyenne's carotid artery.
After a second, his fingers moved to another site. And another. Temple sensed rather than saw the headshake that accompanied his spoken verdict. "Nothing. No pulse."
A nondescript costume woman brought rolled-up towels daubed with suntan-shade makeup anyway, pushing them under Cheyenne's back to keep ... the body ... from rolling onto the arrow.
An arrow. A stage prop gone awry? Or a murder weapon, first and last? Temple stared into Cheyenne's dead face, remembered its charming yet oddly diffident animation the previous night, when he'd invited her to today's rehearsal... for death.
No! He had first asked her to go somewhere else last night. With him. For a drink. To talk. She had considered the invitation frivolous and insincere; he was just another ambitious hunk winning women's favor and influencing votes. Kit and Electra wanted to assume that he was attracted to her, thought that she should accept any flattering invitations. She had brushed off both assumptions. She had said no. She had no time for games.
But maybe Cheyenne was interested in her, for reasons other than the eternal he/she. Maybe he had a problem and knew about her role in uncovering the Stripper Strangler.
She had said no.
Nobody would ever say no to him again.
People were edging away from tragedy, stepping back from death. There was nothing they could do.
Nothing she could do.
"Come on," someone above her urged, a hand on her shoulder, as she had laid hands on Cheyenne's shoulder only moments before.
Temple remained crouched beside the body, dumb as a dog. Danny caught her elbow in his wiry grip and pushed her upright despite herself. She teetered on her high heels like someone on a cliff.
The sudden change in position made her senses swim. Beside her, the horse minced nearer, a great gray wall of muscle and hide.
"Someone get the bleedin' 'orse outta 'ere!" a disconcertingly Cockney voice ordered.
"No," Temple said. "The police will want it kept as close to the scene of the crime as possible. It's evidence."
"Some blighter's supposed to stand 'ere and 'old the big bugger by his nose hairs?"
Temple glanced at the speaker. He was almost as tall as the horse, a chestnut-maned hunk with an artistically broken nose and piercing hazel eyes. He was obviously not volunteering for groom duty.
"I'll .. . hold it," she said. "And we should keep people away from here until the police come."
Temple had never held a horse in her life, much less one bare of bridle and rein. So she stepped near its huge head and caught a fistful of mane, stroking its long nose.
Everyone but Danny Dove and the anonymous Fontana had backed away. Violent death did that to people: first attracted and then repelled them.
"The police have been called?" she asked.
"I sincerely hope so, Miss Annie," Danny said, his face ashen.
"Annie?"
Danny grinned from under his angelic coil of grizzled blond hair. "Annie Oakley, that is. Don't worry, I'll keep an eye on our friend Flicka there with you."
The offer was welcome.
Temple didn't know which she would have more difficulty handling in the long run: the live horse she didn't know how to hold, or the dead man she hadn't known how to help.
Chapter 13
Murder on the Hoof
Death had taken the stage of the Peacock Theater, demanded the attention of everyone in the house, and then had bowed out, leaving only the props from a vanishing act behind.
A fallen man. A riderless horse. A deadly, never-shot arrow. And one sound effect: silence.
Forty-some mute, pallid-faced people sat scattered like whitecaps on empty waves of blue-green velvet seats in the theater's empty house, waiting, not for Godot, but for Clouseau.
Temple and Danny Dove were not among those lackluster islands of people. They sat alone together on the runway's top step in matching poses: glum faces on fists, elbows on knees, like Debbie Reynolds and Donald O'Connor poised to jump up to sing and dance in a movie musical of forty years ago. These two weren't in the mood for a melody.
The stage itself was deserted except for Cheyenne's crumpled form and the heavy-set girl who had finally volunteered to manage the horse. She stroked its long muzzle now, down to the sensitive, flaring nostrils, all the while whispering sweet equine nothings into the nervous, mobile ears.
The auditorium's double entrance doors sprang open with a echoing clank that startled humans and horse alike. The animal whinnied--an eerie, anguished scream that carried like crazy in the semi-deserted house. The people managed to keep silent.
"Is it the police?" Temple asked Danny, not lifting her eyes from their fixed consideration of the thousand-eyed peacock-feather pattern carpeting the aisles.
"How should I know? Two strangers in town, for sure--"
"One of them a woman?"
"The light's at their backs, love, as it is for all good strangers in town. They're both awfully damn tall to be female, though, unless one is a showgirl."
Temple's lips twitched at the notion of applying that word to Lieutenant C. R. Molina. Her gaze lifted to the pair moving down the spectacular carpeting toward them like a bridal couple in civvies on a gaudy magic carpet.
The newcomers paused at the foot of the steps, where Lieutenant Molina didn't even bother saying something witty like "You again."
Mute yet still in tandem, Temple and Danny stood, then parted to reveal the scene behind them.
"What's going on here?" Molina asked Temple after a cursory glance at the body, the horse and the horse-holder.
Temple knew she wanted terse talk. "Rehearsal for the Incredible Hunk contest sponsored by a romance convention meeting in the hotel."
"Incredible Hunk?" Molina's tone was more than incredible.
"Male cover models for romance novels. You know, pirates, Vikings, Indian chiefs. Thirty-some guys competing. One keeled over after riding onstage."
"That's the horse he rode in on?"
What other horse would it be? --Temple nodded
"And the woman with it?"
"A volunteer handler. The horse has no saddle or bridle, and no union hand would object to an outsider taking care of it, I bet.
But I figured you'd want the crime scene as undist
urbed as possible, so it made sense to keep the horse nearby."
"You consider the horse a witness? Did it happen to make a plaintive wail?"
"Only a plaintive whinny," Temple answered, stung by Molina's eternal sarcasm, "but it does have some of the victim's blood on its rump. Won't you need photos and samples?"
"Unfortunately, yes. And probably videotape at five, thanks to the Dream Team." Molina mounted the steps, clumping loudly in her low-heeled loafers, her partner behind her.
Temple had never seen him before: a dapper man with a neat salt-and-pepper moustache. He murmured an apology as he cut a swath between Temple and Danny.
Danny sighed loudly when the officers paused mid-runway to survey the damage.
"Just what I need when I've only got a few piddling hours to mount a show." Danny answered Temple's unspoken question in a hoarse stage whisper. "The police camping out on stage for who-knows-how-long. You've had experience with murders; how many hours will it take them to do their little dust 'n' bust routine?"
Temple surveyed the desultory clots of people. "The cast of witnesses and possible suspects would fill a Cecil B. DeMille crowd scene. Interviews could last all day. The physical crime scene is fairly limited, but the whole backstage area will have to be gone over with a blusher brush, of course. Ask Lieutenant Molina what can be arranged. The Las Vegas police understand about working around public places, crowds and deadlines."
"Lieutenant Molina's the hard-boiled dame in the Hush Puppies? The one you were afraid was coming?"
"You got it, Danny."
"I'd rather ask one of the guys on Mount Rushmore for something."
"Hey, better you than me. She really hates my guts."
"She must have as poor taste in people as she does in footwear."
He grinned an impish farewell before bounding down the stairs to round up his cast and crew for the inevitable police questions. Choreographers always bounded, Temple observed wistfully, as if they had inner-springs in their ankles. Where did they get the energy?
She suddenly had a mental image of Mount Rushmore looming behind her and turned back to the stage. Lieutenant Molina had approached on sneaky Hush Puppy feet and was watching her with the usual disconcerting deadpan before speaking "The Amazon with the horse said that you instructed everybody present at the time of the murder to stay put."
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