Midnight Louie 05-Cat in a Diamond Dazzle

by Douglas, Carole Nelson

  "And three-quarters. That's what I put down as my chest measurement."

  "Three-quarters?"

  "Forty-nine and three-quarters."

  "So you're more of an outside observer than the other contestants," Temple said thoughtfully, still smiling.

  "Yeah. I mean, who'd watch me? So I watch them. And, boy, do they watch themselves a lot. A few of these guys are so hooked on mirrors that they can't even look at who they're talking to. Beauty is a consuming business, isn't it?"

  "Don't ask me. So the contestants are pretty self-absorbed, but the people-watching must be enlightening."

  "Fascinating," he responded Mr. Spock style, with cocked eyebrow and aloof tone. When he saw that Temple had recognized the delivery, he added a wry smile. "He wouldn't have stood a chance here either. Not with those Mickey-Mouse-on-Mars ears."

  "What have you concluded so far?"

  "Besides that I don't have a chance in Hairspray Hell of taking that super-Hunk title? Okay. Most of these guys are pros with attitude, ambitious models or actors hoping to catch one more eye, one more camera, one more big rolling wave of media attention. Some are fun-loving off-camera types, regular guys good-looking enough to enter on a dare from their girlfriends. These guys usually have expectations as ordinary as a day job. Only one other jokester like me slipped in for fun and self-humiliation." Jake spun his makeup tin.

  "Why do it? Couldn't you have imagined a male beauty pageant to put in your comedy act?"

  Jake shrugged. " A Current Affair, Hard Copy and Hot Heads don't show up, cameras running, for any exercises in imagination that I've dreamed up. Look at Pat Paulsen, the comic who regularly runs for president. He's not so nuts. He gets loads of coverage, and even a nanosecond on national TV can jump-start a career. Hey, regardez Kato Kaelin." Only he pronounced the name of the world's most hyphenated man, the live-in hanger-on in the O.J. Simpson case, "Ka-toe Kae-Iin," in a tres, tres phoney French accent.

  "A world did, and you know what? He didn't have anything there to boost."

  "Whatever. Maybe me and the other dud--as opposed to stud--just want to say . . . hey, regular guys can be romantic too."

  "What about Cheyenne? Was he a prime contender? Was he going to win?"

  Jake's shaggy head shook. "Who knows? He had all the right stuff--and seemed hip enough, but... he never gave me a clue about himself. He came storming in, one of the last contestants to arrive, fresh off some transatlantic flight, smelling of first class. I hated his washboard guts."

  "What does first class smell like?"

  "Leather and champagne and stewardess. He plunked down a couple of duffle bags--as you saw from his costume, there wasn't much of it; all he needed otherwise was a tux, jeans, spray mousse and his Evian water. What a guy!"

  "Knowing a murder victim should enliven your act."

  "Sure. I can say all the cover hunks were knocking each other dead."

  "You really think the murder is going plural?"

  Jake's genial, flaccid face--he had a good old gray gelding look--tightened with alarm. "Shit, I hope not! I didn't enlist for hazardous duty with no pay. Waggling your tush for a few hundred screaming women shouldn't be a terminal offense."

  Temple sat at Cheyenne's vacant place, lost against the mirror's reflected burgundy curtains. Even traveling light, Cheyenne carried more hair accessories than Temple kept on her whole cosmetics shelf at home. She picked up a small sleek aluminum canister of mousse, as compactly packaged as Mace. It felt full. She set it down quickly, imagining how many times a living Cheyenne could have still used it.

  "Nobody came for his things but the police," Jake noted. "The duffle bags with his clothes and stuff. I glimpsed an electric shaver, a fancy blow dryer, some foreign magazine, French or Italian. They left the glop."

  He nodded at the slick array of bottles and canisters. "Maybe someone killed him for single-hairedly doing in the ozone layer."

  Temple touched another of the aluminum soldiers on parade. "These are pump-sprays, not aerosol containers. All politically correct. He wasn't hurting anything."

  "He must have been hurting somebody's chances, or why kill him?"

  "It doesn't have to be a pageant rival. Take your pick of possible killers: a jealous lover; an ex-lover of a new lover; a would-be lover spurned. Maybe even a terminally irritated author who hates cover hunks getting all the attention and the money."

  "The authors hate these guys?"

  "Maybe I exaggerate, but many of these women have labored for peanuts book after book. To see some pretty boy walk off with big bucks for standing around buck naked for an hour might be a trifle aggravating. It's a theory."

  "Holy hair-mousse!" Jake flattened his hands on his dressing table top, as if about to spring himself into orbit. "It's bad enough to sashay out in your skivvies in front of hundreds of screaming women, but to think that some of them might be screaming for your blood--! That's gruesome."

  "Cheyenne was killed at the first rehearsal, not at the pageant, but all sorts of suspects were around that morning: fellow contestants--"

  "I didn't do it," he screamed melodramatically, going down on his knees. "You know I'd never win no matter who I eliminated. I could off the entire lot and still lose. I'm innocent, I tell you, innocent."

  Temple refused to be distracted by theatrics. Comics were always on, always improvising. It didn't make them the world's most astute witnesses. She wondered what Molina had made of this guy, while continuing to tick off suspects on her autopsy-red fingernails.

  "And stage crew. Then don't forget the fans... you know, those pudgy, eminently overlookable sweet midlife ladies who volunteer to help you hunks shake your tushies into those skin-tight pants. Demented fans are not unknown in the entertainment biz. Several lady authors were milling around too, trying to figure out who they'd escort on the big night."

  "None were milling around me," Jake reported glumly, pushing himself back into the folding chair.

  "Listen." Temple leaned forward on her chair--Cheyenne's chair--and nailed him with a dead-serious look. "I know life is a cabaret, my friend, but even a professional jokester must occasionally notice more than how his jokes are going over. Cheyenne was worried enough about something to want a tete-a-tete with me the night before he died. Why? Because I'm a PR person? Because I work the hotels and conventions, know the scene? Or because I've been involved in solving a few murders."

  "You? Cute little cheerleader-type you?" Jake's naturally pallid face had turned a lighter shade of gray. "Involved in murders?"

  "Only indirectly."

  "I should hope so!"

  "So tell me something that will help me understand what Cheyenne tried to tell me and couldn't.

  Because I wasn't listening to him that night. You shared this cramped space for what, twenty-four hours? You must have heard, seen something significant."

  Jake shrugged and made a face. "Just the usual. He came in, fighting jet-lag with that kind of show-biz energy you can call on to keep going no matter what."

  "Not drugs?" Temple thought of another motivation: a new, exciting jet-set lifestyle running on speed and sex appeal. . . maybe even smuggling.

  Jake's headshake was final. "Naw. I can tell the difference between a two-hundred-dollar high, a Java jag and Mother Nature's freebies. I've done it, run on the dead certainty of performing. That's what he was high on: doing this pageant and coming out good." Jake's serious voice sank into a Brando drone.

  "He coulda been a contendah--"

  Interviewing a professional comic was like opening a bag filled with cartoon characters all screaming to get out at once. Temple nodded, encouraging Jake to say more.

  "Man, he had energy, though. Made me feel my age, and I don't like to get that personal with myself.

  You should have seen him, dashing out to handle last-minute details. He got that horse here without tipping anybody off but a pal or two. He wanted to surprise the other contestants, too. He wanted 'em all to know he had a leg up on them. Ge
t it? 'Leg up'? Horse?"

  "I get it. So he did have business to take care of once he got here. He could have left the hotel and seen--or been seen by--almost anybody."

  Jake nodded solemnly. "He did act. . . abstracted, though, rehearsal morning. He dashed out with one of his duffle bags, and when he came back, he kinda threw it in a corner as if he didn't like what was in it. Like it wasn't really part of him. Now that you nag me to death about it, he acted a little schizy. Even asked me to run out and get him a Pepsi, when he'd been guzzling nothing but Evian water. He was--"

  "Worried?"

  "Maybe. Or maybe he wanted to get rid of me for a while. When I came back, he didn't say much.

  Just grabbed his stage kit, stood up in that skimpy outfit, what would you call it--teeny weeny loincloth and itty bitty medicine bag and great big quiver on his back, which come to think of it, was a hell of a phallic symbol. Lord, that would make the ladies quiver! I guess, looking at him as Navaho Joe, I knew my chances had been shot in the heart." Jake's arms spread wide to display his unremarkable body in its unremarkable clothes. "What's to say?"

  "You've got nerve," Temple admitted. "I bet the ladies will love you, especially the hunky-cover-model haters."

  "The ladies, God bless 'em, love a lot of guys like me. These studly types with mammoth muscles are just window dressing. For looking at, not into."

  "Perfect Kens," Temple mused. "As in Ken and Barbie." She recalled Matt's dislike of his own good looks for the superficial attention they brought him. "Still, beautiful people have real feelings. And fears.

  Somebody must have feared Cheyenne--Charlie Moon--enough to kill him."

  "You think that was the motive? Not jealousy?"

  "What kind of jealousy, that's the question."

  "And a good question. Was it a maddened contestant, afraid he'd lose the crown to a hot contender?" Jake donned a guilty, hang-dog look. "Or was it some red-hot lover afraid of losing Cheyenne, period?" Jake twirled an imaginary mustache.

  "Did you glimpse any romantic hunky-panky around here?"

  "In less than two days? Hardly likely." His face flickered with sudden remembrance. "Say, I did see Cheyenne holding cocktail glasses with an author in the hotel bar, pretty late the first night we got in."

  "Who?"

  He shrugged. "Haven't seen her again. Not one of the pageant participants, for sure. Classy lady. I was gonna say 'older,' but I bet she's only a few years older than me, so I better watch it. Still a looker. Your size. Red hair, too, but hers isn't as bright."

  Temple's blood froze. She recognized a spot-on description of her aunt Kit when she heard it.

  "What time Wednesday night?"

  "Time I saw them? Oh, say around eleven. She was old enough to be his mother, but Cheyenne seemed like a cosmic kind of guy. I bet details like age, gender and national origin didn't faze him one bit."

  Temple, though still in shock about Kit, was not surprised to have her bisexual suspicions confirmed by an impartial source.

  "Don't look so shocked, sweet thing." Jake sounded like a counseling older brother, but he misread what had really shocked her. "Consenting adults try all sorts of combinations nowadays. But I doubt anything is going on at this convention. Too much performance pressure for the boys. Everybody's way too stressed out by the pageant to have time for romancel"

  Jake, sprawled against the dressing table, then assumed a maniacally suave expression that ludicrously altered his homely face, and not for the better. "Unless you aren't doing anything tonight, ba-bee?"

  "Sorry, Fabrizio Junior." Temple stood, patience and interview ended. "All booked up."

  Chapter 25

  True Confessions

  C. R. Molina cruised the Crystal Phoenix hotel lobby, cursing casino floor plans that always forced people to pass gaming attractions on the way in or out.

  She disliked the constant clatter of slot machines, especially when she was trying to think. Not that she had much to think about: only the inevitable end of the romance convention, and with it the exit of all likely suspects in the Charlie Moon murder.

  She knew that the odds on solving the case by Monday were longer than the odds on a nickel slot machine payoff. So the chugchug-chug of doomed coins down mechanical gullets sounded like the Failure Machine engine revving up before running her over.

  This annoying convention murder case particularly rankled, coming, as it did, on the heels of her unexpected and spectacularly unproductive encounter at the Blue Dahlia the very night before the morning of Charlie Moon's demise.

  Recalling the frustrating skirmish with Max Kinsella brought to mind her always-annoying head-to-heads with a known associate of the elusive magician: Temple Barr. Molina could not believe she had encouraged the woman's nosiness on this case. But in some instances, any sort of information was worth the effort. Even as she mentally stalked the thin grungy line of her remaining options during a swift passage through the gaming area, Molina's professional eye was on automatic record. One anomaly pricked her consciousness: a pit boss engaged in deep discussion. Pit bosses watched, they did not talk. Especially not to rank casino amateurs like ...

  Molina stopped in her tracks, letting tourists jostle her as they scurried for their slot machines of choice. The stance of the person with the pit boss was even more naggingly out of place than the becalmed supervisor.

  She spun into a different direction and quietly circled the pair beside the inactive craps table, approaching so she faced the pit boss.

  Spike Saltzer was a casino veteran, a seventyish man with supernaturally shiny, full black hair and a perpetual tan. The tan was his only Las Vegas vice; Spike didn't smoke, drink or do drugs. Sometimes she even wondered if he slept. He had been married since Bugsy Siegel had died, to the same woman, and attended the Golden Light Church. Despite all that, or perhaps because of it, he missed no abnormal action on a gaming floor, so he had spotted Molina almost as soon as she had him. He didn't show it, except to back off from his conversation partner.

  Pit bosses were the casino ringmasters, captains of the Good Ship Fun (yours) and Fortune (theirs).

  They kept the action constant and clean, weather eye always alert for fraudulent patrons-- or employees, which was more often the case. That's why pit bosses seldom stood around to chitchat with--Molina was close enough to the blond man to confirm her first impression--Matt Devine. Well, well.

  She managed to materialize beside both men before Devine, at least, knew what was happening.

  So how long could--" He glanced at the nearing motion and saw her. Conversation stopped.

  She enjoyed the confused, possibly guilty, expression on his striking face.

  "I got no more time," Spike announced in a voice fogged by decades of second-hand smoke. His hooded eyes paused on Molina for a split second, then he was back cruising the tables like the seasoned land-shark he was.

  "Lieutenant," Devine greeted her, his face still slack with surprise.

  "Too bad I can't return a title," she said, smiling as his confusion deepened into wariness, if not resentment. "So. What were you and Spike talking about?"

  "Nothing . . . important. Nothing of interest. To you."

  "Everything is of interest to me, especially when it's adjacent to a murder scene."

  If anything, Devine looked even more guilty. It was almost mean of her to prolong his misery and confusion, but her current need for the upper hand was probably a reaction to her split decision set-to with Max Kinsella the other night. Yes, it was mean of her, she decided, to transfer her rage toward a more expert opponent to a lesser quarry.

  "Miss Barr is backstage or downstairs, I believe," she said brusquely, assuming Temple was the reason he had come to the Crystal Phoenix. "Why did you stop to pester Saltzer?"

  "I was curious about how this place is run, that's all. Temple is here? Alone?"

  Devine looked even more puzzled, and more worried, if possible.

  "Alone? Not if she can help it. I believe about thirty pa
perback heroes are flitting about her general vicinity."

  "Paperback heroes?"

  "Cover hunks. Models. Male models. Romance-novel cover hunks. You do know about the romance conference?"

  Devine shook his head.

  "Isn't that why you're here? Because she is, yes, once more dead center of a murder investigation. Or are you here to protect the officers of the law from the patented brand of Barr interference, dare I hope?"

  "The murder is . . . old news," he said cautiously.

  "How blase you amateurs become. Yeah, the guy died a whole thirty hours ago, but the case file has hardly grown cobwebs." Molina studied his still-blank face and took mercy, in her own way.

  "Did you know that a certain someone is back in town, by the way?"

  "Did you?" he replied warily.

  "Would I ask otherwise?"

  "How did you--?"

  "The power of the police," she answered, her tone self-mocking. "I suppose that this bodes quite a change of weather for you."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Well, you were the escort of record, and now 'Max is back.' " She was paraphrasing a line from "Mac the Knife," but it was lost on Devine.

  "That's between Temple and . . . him."

  "Is it? I think not. It's between him and the law."

  "Have you arrested him?"

  "Don't get your hopes up."

  Devine flushed slightly. She really was vile to pick on someone so ill-suited for performing the courtship gavotte. She smiled again, this time nicely.

  "I'm afraid I can't discuss the details, but the Mystifying Max will most certainly be arrested as soon as I can get a hold of him."

  "What for?"

  "Irritating an officer? Don't worry, there will be something I can pin on his pony tail one day soon."

  She watched his face tauten with the belief that she really had seen Kinsella. That's why she had added the telling detail of the ponytail. And now she knew that Devine had seen this "demmed elusive"

  creature as well.

  "What did you think of him?" she asked next.