Midnight Louie 05-Cat in a Diamond Dazzle

by Douglas, Carole Nelson

  "A day ago, who would have thought cover modeling could be so lethal?" Kit demanded.

  Temple nodded, ambling down a memory lane of memorabilia. The film-strip design carpeting detoured to a rest room alcove, where signatures of the kitsch and famous covered the walls. A cardboard-cutout Ann Miller lurked on a stairway landing, wearing mostly fishnet hose and a mile-wide smile.

  "So these are all authentic props and costumes," Temple noted. "I always wondered where that stuff ended up."

  "Sold at auction and separated," Kit said. "The idea here is to bring it all back together. I bet you're really aching to see Dorothy's ruby red slippers. A pair is on display here."

  "Truly?" Temple brightened. "The ones on the MGM mannequin are contemporary copies, because the actual shoes used in the movie are too valuable to set out to steal. Poor Toto was dognapped a few months ago."

  "Somebody nipped Toto?" Kit's deep voice reached a soprano squeak of indignation. "Is there no respect?"

  "Not in Las Vegas, and not in New York City either, I bet."

  Kit shrugged, then looked past the rail dividing the hallway from the restaurant, a low-lit cavern whose dark walls showcased black-and-white photos of famous film faces of the forties.

  "Perfect!" Kit clapped her hands with delight. "We can snag that huge back-corner banquette, then conspire in utter privacy. Maybe Humphrey Bogart will stop by our table and ask Sam to play 'As Time Goes By.' "

  "And maybe Ingrid Bergman will ask us the way to the ladies' room."

  "Oh, pooh, Temple. You have no romance in your soul. Sometime this weekend I'll have to find out why over a mai tai or another equally tongue-loosening concoction."

  "If we want that booth, we had better sit down."

  "Right."

  They made for the entrance and its waiting hostess, but Temple stopped before they could be seated.

  "Is that really Tallulah Bankhead's trunk?" she asked.

  "Absolutely," the attractive blond cashier confirmed from be-hind her glass case of sundries.

  Despite the initials T.B. emblazoned on its brown side--"My initials," Temple whispered to Kit--the trunk was a low-profile prop compared to the glamorous babes atop it. Suspended in gaudy gowns like a pair of lifesize puppets, which they were, were Jim Henson's imperious Miss Piggy and Wayland Flowers's brass-mouthed Madame, both in hot pink and ostrich plumes. Behind them was a wall mural of a 1930s Hollywood studio "class photo," filled with famous faces named Astaire and Gable and Garland.

  "Hmmm," Temple said, the windmills of her mind visibly churning in double time.

  "We need to be seated." Kit dragged her away from the exhibit as if she were a dawdling child.

  "Yes, mother," Temple mocked as they wove through the intervening tables to the gigantic corner booth of tufted red leather.

  "The rest of our party should be along shortly," Kit told the hostess, who left the requested six menus before returning to her post. "Temple! What is it?"

  "Just a wicked idea. Maybe your focus group can help me with it after lunch."

  "I need to fill you in on who we'll be seeing."

  "Right." Temple set the menu aside and folded her hands on her lap like a good child.

  "You wanted a crash course in who's who and what's what in the romance world, so I've recruited--

  not the best and the brightest--but the nicest and the knowingest. The stars are on a plane of their own and may be nice enough, but simply no longer share the common interests of the rest of us grunion struggling for our places on the sand. The raw beginners are eager, but naive as newts. What I've assembled is a panel of midlist experts. You do know what midlist is?"

  "Not yet bestselling, name-brand authors; steady performers with potential."

  "Very good, my dear. Doing PR for the American Booksellers Association convention was an instant education."

  "Actually, I learned all that stuff from meddling in the murder investigation."

  "We do not ask how, just how much. Anyway, what you'll meet here is a cross-section of the heart of the romance industry, pardon the expression. I know them from other conventions. We've all been around the publishing track a few times, and we're not about to be pushed off the merry-go-round. Still, we're not megastars. We have concerns about the field and what's happening in it, and to us."

  "Sound like experts to me." Temple lifted her water glass in a toast.

  Kit chinked rims with her own water goblet. "Just don't be surprised to find that feelings run high. For many of these women, this is their livelihood."

  "Is that enough to kill for, do you think?"

  "You mean. . . one of us might have murdered Cheyenne?" Kit looked truly shocked.

  "Suspects come in all shapes, sizes and sexes."

  "I believe that there are only two sexes, niece."

  "Not in Las Vegas," Temple said firmly. Her blue-gray eyes intensified to the color of navy slate. "Say, do you suppose those prize shoes might be on a drag queen at Gays 'n' Dolls downtown? Who would ever think to look for them on a size twelve foot?"

  "A transvestite revue? Not on your life. Those shoes would no more deign to dance to the wrong number than Dorothy's ruby slippers would shoe the tin woodman. Now, get your mind off fancy footwear and on the murder case at hand, because here come my body of experts."

  Temple looked across the dim room. A clot of colorful convention-going garb ranging from linen blazers to cotton print dresses to hand-painted jersey sweat suits were milling beside Miss Piggy and Madame. If they were hoping to disguise their origin, they were off to a bad start. Each clutched a black canvas bag emblazoned with g.r.o.w.l. and hot-pink hearts.

  In moments the hostess had led the four newcomers to the banquette. All one could hear was the squeak of cushions as they slid behind the table on both sides of Temple and Kit.

  Temple felt like a kid trapped mid-seat in a carnival thrill ride. On the one hand, she was cushioned from all exterior shocks; on the other, she was in danger of being crushed by her human shock absorbers.

  They accomplished the business of ordering by calling for two large pizzas and ice tea. The waitress bustled away after warning them the pizzas would take twenty minutes.

  "No problem," Kit said. "We have lots to talk about." She began with introductions. "Temple is my niece and totally trustworthy." (Temple thought that was a nice thing to say, especially since they had just met.) "The lady on the far left is Doctor Susan Schuler." (Temple paused as she worried her glasses from the squashed tote bag beside her. A doctor--that was interesting. What kind?)

  "Do you mind if I take notes?" Temple asked. "Not for ... evidence or anything, but simply because I won't be able to tell you apart for a while."

  "Hey, that's easy." A woman wearing a red, black and white flowered dress with puffed sleeves reached into the tiny patent leather bag trailing from a thin shoulder strap. "Slap on our con-vention badges, people, for Temple. We can remove them again in transit."

  Soon Temple was gratefully studying the group's left shoulders.

  "What kind of doctor are you?" she asked the woman named Susan, a low-key type who wore no makeup and whose short, permanent-waved hair was a greige Brillo pad.

  "A gynecologist," said a younger woman in a yellow linen blazer, with a teasing laugh.

  "Not a medical doctor," Susan said tolerantly.

  "Ph.D?" Temple asked with the awe of a lowly B.A.

  "Right, in anthropology."

  "Susan's written a book on the roots of romance fiction," Kit said. " Alpha Men and Omega Women. "

  "Any relation to that bestseller, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus? "

  Everybody but Temple laughed. Susan reached into her canvas convention bag to extract a trade paperback with a plain-Jane cover.

  "Afraid not, Temple. This is a scholarly tome from a university press, with a minuscule print run. Even persuading a university press to publish a book on a topic as despised as romance novels was a triumph."

  Temple pulled over th
e book to riffle the pages. Chapter titles like "He Tarzan, You Jane" leaped out as they flashed by. Also "Wild West vs. Nest."

  "It's yours." Susan's smile would melt nails and certainly dissolved any dry academic air clinging to her. "Instant background, and we academic press authors are pathetically happy to have people read our books, even if we have to give them away."

  "Thanks. It looks fascinating--no, really! This chapter, "Hawks and Doves"--it sounds like a political thesis."

  "Bless you! God knows I'd get more respect for analyzing dull matters like politics." Susan shook her curlicued head. "Hawks and doves are opposites, as they are in real life, but in romance novels the battle is the war between the sexes."

  A jolly-looking woman with airy blond curls, wearing a nice, comfy knit pants outfit to disguise her nice, comfy expansive body, lifted a finger to pronounce: " The Flame and the Flower. Let us all bow our heads for a moment of silence."

  Temple neither bowed nor kept the peace. "What does that mean?" she asked the blond grandmotherly type, whose nametag read LaDonna Morgan.

  The other women laughed.

  "It's a title," explained a sleek black woman of forty named Vivian Brown.

  " The title," LaDonna corrected.

  Even Kit had something to say on the subject. "The title that launched a thousand hips, so to speak.

  The first sexually explicit historical romance written by a woman."

  "What about Forever Amber?" a woman named Lori asked. She had shining, long brown hair and a teenager's fresh-cream complexion, though she must have been Temple's age. Or more.

  "A forerunner," Susan declared, "but not the true revolutionary work that Kathleen Woodiwiss's book was."

  Temple watched the discussion, feeling that she was watching a tennis match from the much-confused point-of-view of the net.

  "What do flames and flowers have to do with hawks and doves?" she wanted, very sensibly, to know.

  "Titles," Susan explained. "The ever-important titles. The uninitiated sneer at what they see as stereotypical romance titles, not realizing the art of it. Oxymorons are all in the romance field."

  "Oxymoron ..." Temple was sure she had once known what that word meant, long ago and far away, in a college communications class in Minnesota. "Not something I put on an untimely zit, is it?"

  "Nor is it an idiotic castrated bovine." Kit's over articulated, prissy diction made everybody giggle.

  "I think Kit is referring to what we call a plain bull with no balls in Missouri," LaDonna said.

  "Is that why they call it the 'Show Me' state?" Lori threw in with a wicked grin.

  "Oh, lawdy, we're gettin' bawdy." Vivian sighed. "Temple will think we're awful."

  "You can't write about the world's most hilarious subjects-- love, sex and marriage--without a sense of humor," Kit said. "And Temple has been in the thea-tuh, dahlings. Nothing shocks her."

  "Not true," Temple objected. "I've just learned not to show it. Right now, I am shocked that, with so many writers present, no one has explained 'oxymoron' yet in a clear, one-syllable manner."

  "We bow to academe." Kit nodded at Susan, who had watched the byplay with a smile.

  "The textbook definition is more confusing than Kit's, believe it or not: an oxymoron is 'a rhetorical figure in which an epigrammatic effect is created by the conjunction of incongruous or contradictory terms,' for example, 'a mournful optimist.' "

  "Get that woman a copy editor! Simplify, simplify." LaDonna hooted, then put her hands on her ample hips. "I've always wanted a rhetorical figure, though."

  "Not to mention an epigrammatic effect," Vivian added.

  "That would be LaDonna in a Wonderbra," Lori teased her full-figured senior.

  "Seriously." Susan smothered laughter in the stiffening corners of her mouth. "Seriously speaking, romance novels heighten the differences between the sexes before they resolve them. If literal oxymorons aren't used in titles, certainly suggestive opposites are employed. In these metaphors--we do all know what that means?--the man is the wild, untamed, consuming masculine element and the woman is the fragile, lovely, preserving or enduring element. Flame. Flower. The Flame and the Flower. "

  A moment's silence held as each recalled a favorite, illustrative title.

  " The Leopard and the Lark, " Sylvia put in.

  " The Hawk and the Dove, " said Lori, nodding.

  " The Tiger and the Titwillow,' " Temple interjected. "Or, with a bow to our new friend the oxymoron,

  'The Bull and the Buttercup.' I get the picture, ladies."

  "That's just one pattern of title." Susan was still grinning at Temple's impudent images.

  Temple frowned in suspicion. "Why does the symbol representing the man always come first?"

  "Because he gets his in the end," LaDonna said.

  "What does he get?"

  "He gets the girl," said Kit.

  "He gets domesticated. Tamed." Susan sounded fully academic now. "That's why the titles exaggerate gender differences. That's where the oft-satirized 'Sweet, Savage' school of romance titles came from, and phrases like 'devil's angel' or 'steel and silk.' Don't let the namby-pamby female symbols fool you. Romances ultimately empower the woman. By succumbing to the force of masculine passion, swaying with the sensual storm, the heroine subdues the hero's lone-wolf ways and transforms him from demon lover into loving husband, helpmate and, ultimately, father."

  " 'The Wolf and the Willow,' " Temple summed up sourly. She wasn't in the mood for the male-female gavotte or happy endings. "Okay. Granted that romance novels are complex blends of mythological models and pop culture, where do the cover guys fit in?"

  "Between the sheets," impish Lori suggested, dimpling like a Regency Miss.

  "Off the cover!" Vivian's fist pounded the table top.

  "Hear, hear!" came from Kit.

  "Now that's an interesting phenomenon," Susan began. "In the beginning--"

  "In the beginning the heroine was the cover focus, and the hero was just a handsome prop," Vivian noted. "That was the heyday of the 'bodice ripper' covers that gave the genre such a bad name.

  Remember the heroine with her hair flowing over her shoulders and her front falling out of her dress?"

  "The Love Is a Wild Assault days," Susan agreed. "Don't look askance at me, Temple, there really was a romance novel titled that. As women readers became more open about what they wanted in romance novels, the heroine went from a passive, reluctant object of unwanted masculine onslaught to--"

  "An adoring, willing, ogling prop at the feet of the new romance cover star--the mighty hero." Kit shook her head.

  Temple smiled. "I take it some of you dislike the new hero-central covers."

  "Some of us," Vivian said, "have loathed the old clinch covers and the intermediate 'dueling cleavage'

  covers of bare-chested hero and half bare-breasted heroine all along. Now we loath the newest wrinkle: he alone in all his muscular, hairy glory, although he can't have hair on his face or his chest, for God's sake. Male models are waxed and air-brushed into unreality just like female ones. And, in the process, somehow women have been pushed off center stage in what's considered a women's genre, written by women for women."

  "Oh, Viv, you're just griping because you have a master's degree in history to protect you from intimations of sleaze."

  LaDonna's face beamed as the waitress wafted a large round pizza tray onto her end of the table.

  "Face it, honey. Hunks are in, so we writers might as well enjoy the view. Besides, it's liberating to have men as sex objects for a change."

  "What do you think?" Temple asked Susan as the second pizza tray hovered and then descended like an aluminum UFO in their midst.

  The group separated their chosen slices from the artery-clotting herd and installed them on bread plates. Discussion stalled as cheese extended into thin strings and knives excised edible bites.

  Susan thoughtfully nibbled a sauce-gored slice. "The new covers offer positives and negatives. Lots o
f romance covers nowadays have beautifully embossed and foiled fronts with more mainstream and neutral subject matter: flowers, fabric, and precious objects. The front cover opens to an interior step-back painting: the old clinching couple--or the man alone in a few cases."

  "Now those you could take on the subway, or a bus." Sophisticated Vivian, with her black blunt-cut bob, managed to fit her comment in between swallows. She was attacking her pizza like Attila the Hun.

  "But hunks sell books," LaDonna insisted between bites.

  "Do they?" Kit was breaking her pizza slice into tiny pieces with fork and knife. "Sure, Fabio was a twelve-day wonder, but will anyone pull down the attention and the money the first and most famous male cover model did?"

  "Even if they don't match his take, so what?" LaDonna answered. "The Incredible Hunk contest is a big chance for these guys. Most are models who wanna be actors, or actors who wanna be models. Not only is there a little barbell money in cover modeling, but the hunk contest itself is fodder for tabloid TV, so whoever is named Incredible Hunk gets a lot of exposure."

  "I guess." Kit rolled her eyes at the unconscious double entendre. "Possible calendars, game show appearances, film jobs, syndicated TV show parts, maybe even a stab at the America's most famous houseguest/hostile witness title."

  "Ooh, what a great idea!" Lori's eyes were shining to match her glossy hair. "Kato as an IH

  contestant."

  "Which one do you have in mind?" Vivian asked in an indifferent drawl. "The dude or the dog?"

  Temple wanted the talk back on track. "Is that kind of media exposure worth killing for?"

  That stilled knives and forks and mouths. Kit leaned close to mouth dramatically: "Motive Number One: Model Competition."

  "Fame and fortune is always a worthy motive," Vivian said.

  "So a rival hunk could have killed Cheyenne?"

  "Sure." LaDonna shrugged. "Except one dead dude wouldn't guarantee another the title. The judging is honest, as far as I know."

  "There are early favorites," Vivian objected. "You know that, LaDonna. You've seen the guys chat up the convention-goers. Prince Charmings by the pack. They charm them, then sweep them off their feet--"