Midnight Louie 05-Cat in a Diamond Dazzle

by Douglas, Carole Nelson

  "Funny. I was going to ask you that."

  She shrugged. With a wary soul like Devine, going first often meant getting what you want last. "How would they say it in the old days? 'A smooth customer.' But mine is a professional evaluation. I'm not interested in the personal."

  "My summation is professional too," he said coolly enough, finally relaxing into their verbal fencing match. "A complex personality. Charming, of course. Alarmingly bright, but... somehow uneasy. And dark. A deep, dark streak, quintessentially Celtic."

  "Celtic. Not the usual word you find on police blotters, Mr. Devine. I'll have to take it into consideration."

  "Why are you baiting me?"

  "Oh, because I have nothing better to do, or because I'm frustrated with the current case and it's more amusing to worry at old ones."

  "Current case? Another murder?"

  "Which murder did you think I meant? Or is there one I don't know about?"

  "There have been so many since--"

  "Since you met Miss Barr. I know. Well, now there's another. One of the competing cover hunks.

  Arrow through the back sec-onds before a dramatic entrance--and exit--at an onstage rehearsal. Didn't she tell you about it?"

  "I haven't seen Temple in a while."

  "So she doesn't know you're here?"

  "No. And I didn't--"

  "Know she was here. Where did you think she had gone?"

  "I--I don't know. I didn't want to ask. I figured--"

  "No. No, my son. She is not with the Mystifying Max, at least not that I can tell. I would expect her to be less interested in the cover model murder, if that were the case, and no such luck. However, I wouldn't get too complacent, if I were you. She's with thirty-some half-clad muscular male models."

  He frowned, ignoring her jibes. "Temple shouldn't be involving herself in that."

  "I agree, but she does not. This time she has a guilty conscience."

  "Guilty? Temple?" He sounded more alarmed by the latest murder than by Max's return, Molina noted.

  "The victim had asked to speak to her alone the night before the murder. She knew him--slightly, she says--from the stripper competition a few months ago."

  "I didn't know much about that," Devine muttered, distracted.

  Molina suddenly realized why he was so disoriented. "That's why you were talking to Saltzer! You knew nothing about the latest murder, you were inquiring about the Effinger death. Oh, great, another amateur detective on the loose."

  "Not an amateur anything." He flushed again, a victim of the ex-priest's innocence of ordinary social give-and-take beyond the charmed circle of a clerical collar. "I'm a concerned party in that case. Effinger was my stepfather. Or was the dead man really Effinger?"

  Molina reared back, ambushed by an astute question. "What do you mean?"

  "What do you mean, Lieutenant?" he added more softly. "You misled me. Why? I finally ... realized that there was no need for me to trek to the morgue and view the remains. Effinger had a police record.

  His fingerprints would be available here, and in Chicago. Why did you put me through that identification mummery? For fun? Is that what you learned in Catholic schools, Carmen?"

  Molina discovered that she had inherited the Catholic flush of guilt, too, especially when an ex-priest had caught her being officially devious and then used her hated baptismal name to bring the venial sin home.

  "I needed your input," she said stiffly.

  "Input?" His tone made the word an epithet. "Is that what you call it? I didn't have much input.

  Standing in that vacant place, with those vacant corpses in various stages of dissection, with that . . .

  smell like bitter orange blossoms strewn atop a cesspool, waiting for the beige curtain to be drawn so I can look down on some still, beige body under a white sheet. Death warmed over posing as cold oatmeal. Why, when you already knew-- knew --who he was?"

  "But I didn't," she confessed in a low voice. "I still don't, since even you couldn't be certain."

  "But the fingerprints--!"

  "Don't match," Molina admitted, hearing the bitterness in her own voice. The failure.

  "Don't match?"

  He stared into her face, a handsome man her own height, who couldn't, wouldn't dream of intimidating her except with the moral indignation he had rightfully leveled at her. Using him without telling him why was part of her job. Most parts of her job were not nice.

  Matt Devine settled into his own uneasy speculations, his emotions finally as readable as face-up playing cards. He was starting to learn the game of self-defense. She frowned. Using someone as undefendedly honest as Devine was more than mean; it was rotten. She suspected that his family history was tortured, now she could see the proof of that.

  "It's a good thing I didn't call my mother--" He thought aloud, making her kick herself again for good measure.

  Yet the reflex of official suspicion would not be denied. If the Devine/Effinger family history was so tormented, Matt Devine could have killed the man who called himself Cliff Effinger, not knowing any better than she who he really was.

  "Thanks for finally telling the truth," he said, looking up.

  She wished she could be sure enough to say the same.

  Chapter 26

  Another Opening, Another Shoe

  Shades of the late, great Gridiron Show! Temple was once again racing through the theatrical underbelly of the Crystal Phoenix, thinking about skits, costumes and crime. This time she was in cover-model costume, so she had long, heavy lavender brocade skirts to drag along. Good thing she had packed her Guthrie costume.

  Off-the-shoulder necklines may be tailor-made to drive historical romance heroes crazy. They are also designed, she found, to drive anyone who wears them--except a broad-shouldered linebacker--

  insane. She shrugged as she ran, wanting the material either on or off. It persisted in riding her shoulder rim like a gargoyle clinging to a cathedral ledge.

  Her ice-cold fingers jerked up one brocade shoulder . . . what self-respecting romance heroine wouldn't have cold fingers when she was about to rehearse a pose-down with a cover hunk? Heavy on the hunk, no doubt, and light on the rehearsal. She'd heard the author escorts buzzing about a contestant who'd tried to goose any passing female last year.

  Though Danny had promised to steer obstreperous sorts away from her, he wasn't God and couldn't control everything. And with Crawford Buchanan's stepdaughter Quincey, a not-so-sweet sixteen, among the cover models, Temple was bound to inherit some of the lusty overflow directed away from Quincey. Temple could hardly plead maidenly qualms at thirty.

  She circled her neck to ease a cramp, rebelling against a fall of hot, heavy red hair, also part of the complete covergirl's costume. The hairpiece still felt prone to ebb down her back like an auburn sun sinking slowly in the West, so she jabbed oversize bobby pins into her coiffure as she went, hoping to hit hair, wig or something anchor able, even scalp would do in a pinch....

  Of course she had to wear extremely flat-footed satin slippers, so naturally she slipped on the slick concrete and went skating ahead of herself until she caught a costume rack pole, tilting it to perform a fancy circle-stop against the wall.

  Temple leaned against the concrete blocks and panted. Running in this heavy, theatrical getup did her composure no good. At least she hadn't damaged the "real" costumes. She eyed a frothy row of still-swaying sequins, pearls and feathers from the Phoenix's nightly revue. The pageant people, of which she was now one, were transients, mere borrowers of this space and these facilities. Interfering with the true show people would be a professional discourtesy.

  Righting herself and the rack, her glance was caught by something underneath it that twinkled. She couldn't have stumbled upon another entrance to the underground tunnels, because those were all sealed. What she saw was a shoe, no doubt.

  A shoe in fact. It lay toppled. Only the sole was visible, as smooth and untouched as fresh-laid linoleum. But a tiny rim of glitter visib
le around the toe beckoned like a tinfoil smile, and Temple found herself smiling back. Some people smiled at babies. She smiled at shoes. So sue her!

  Oh, what the heck! She could at least see what it looked liked. That was her eternal quest, after all.

  She sank into airy layers of her costume's velvet and brocade skirts, then crouched by the rack and bent forward despite the strict disinclination of her corset. She finally managed, with a few grunts, to touch her fingertips to the shoe.

  The difficulty made her all the more set on seeing the hidden shoe. That rim of glitz looked mighty like solid silver-white rhinestones. Wouldn't it be wild if this was it? The shoe! Maybe a show-girl (shoegirl?) wore it onstage nightly.

  By inching the sole closer with her fingernails, Temple was finally able to pinch her fingers on the toe and work the shoe close enough to pick up.

  Except it was... a boot. And what a boot! She stared, stunned, like a Cinderella with an absolute klutz for a fairy godmother.

  Oh, it was a fancy boot: inlaid flame-patterns of silver leather, with rhinestones scattered hither and thither like glitzy exclamation points. Though flashy enough to be a women's boot--it was like a size . . .

  Bigfoot. And all the rhinestones did glitter, but most were big and clunky. In a word, crude. Sorry, fairy godmother, you aren't klutzy, but your taste in boots sure as shootin' is! Of course showgirls, being almost six feet tall, usually wear fairly large-size shoes. Maybe this was an escapee from a Western routine. Rhinestone Clementine. The old California folk song ran through Temple's mind, with new words. In a basement, in a ho-tel, excavaaaating for a crime, toiled a miner, old-bootfinder and her name was Ne'er-on-time. Light she was and like a fairy, but her boots were number nine. Big old bootsies, for giant tootsies, not the shoes she'd hoped to find.

  Temple stood up, painfully, the big, bad boot in hand, and puzzled. Here she was, hunting the prize designer pumps and here she had found--instead--a crude rhinestone boot that Trigger wouldn't wear on a bad mane day. Surely this ghastly thing had a mate! She couldn't bear to bend over again, so she tried to sweep the long costumes up from the floor with her slipper-clad foot. All right, she kicked the hems into a froth. No other boot lay revealed under the rack. Yippee cayaaaa! This was a lonesome boot.

  So a boot had been forgotten under the costume rack. Discarded, or deliberately ditched? Why?

  Temple was expected on-stage right now for some serious hunk-hugging. What to do? She tapped the boot's virgin sole against one palm, undecided. Why was it unworn and abandoned? She would have to contemplate that mystery later.

  She bolted back down the empty hallway, back to the two-mirror cubicle she shared with the sullen Quincey. There she dumped the boot in her canvas totebag. She would worry about it later. Right now, she had more pressing matters, like two hundred and twenty pounds of bare, muscled serial hunk to contend with.

  Fabrizio stood, wide-stanced, hands on hips (what big hands, what lean hips!), hair tossed back over his shoulders (what luxuriant hair, what broad shoulders!) facing the stage.

  That was where his audience was, at the moment. The house seats were empty, but the stage teemed with testosterone and its most spectacular by-products. Thirty-three handsome heroes, restless as a wayward wind, wandered the risers, which squeaked for mercy under their conjoined weight.

  Fontana brothers roved in a restless pack, all clad in tight black-denim jeans.

  Danny Dove sat cross-legged on the stage floor like a power-mad elf, facing the models--frowning, pointing and projecting his voice to the wings.

  "You. Three feet to the left. Not you with the three left feet! Come to think of it, don't move a muscle. We haven't got accident insurance. Just kidding, gang. And you in the tape-measure suspenders.

  Down a riser, big boy, your head will be hitting the boom mike. Yes, Mr. Fontana the Fifth or whoever, edge that boyishly lean bod over just. . . a . . . tad."

  Temple felt small and vulnerable as she huddled with the other two pose-down girls in the stage-left wings. She would have liked to stay there. Her two sister models were dallying with their costumes, jerking them down from the top and up from the bottom, exactly the opposite approach Temple was inclined to take.

  Quincey was gowned as an Old West saloon girl. Whether she had a heart of gold was unclear, but her deck-of-cards bustier featured the jacks of hearts and diamonds front and provocatively centered.

  Her knee-length red-satin skirt was edged in black marabou feathers, which she was hiking up to high heaven on one hip and fastening there with a safety pin.

  "Don't you have any underwear on?" Temple asked, following the diamondback-rattlesnake pattern of Quincey's fishnet pantyhose all the way to ground zero.

  "Of course not." Quincey's tone was pure teenage disdain. "You never know what will show during one of these things, Danny said. Would you want someone out there in the audience seeing your groady old underwear?"

  "Well, it might be better than the alternative." Temple tugged at her receding dress shoulders again.

  "Darn. This outfit will not stay put!"

  "Your boobs are supposed to hold it up," Quincey explained, rolling heavily made-up eyes.

  Oh, that's the problem." Temple regarded the gown's gaping neckline. "I don't have any."

  "Sure you do. Just lean way forward into the dress, then stand up again."

  Quincey demonstrated with limber enthusiasm, thus revealing the tiny tattoo of a bulldog smoking a cigar that had hitherto hidden coyly behind the jack of hearts. Her mild exercise had increased her bra size by at least a letter of the alphabet. Bras were the only subject where getting Cs was better than Bs or As.

  Temple, impressed despite herself, bent over, nearly cutting off the circulation in her torso, and rose again. Quincey was right, the bodice felt tighter and--oh, my--much more of her had come out to look around.

  "What keeps us from falling out of these getups during the action onstage?" she wondered next.

  "Nothing," said the girl on her other side, a brunette named Lacey with authentically long, burnished hair. These were mere girls so slight and young that there was no point in calling them women and looking ridiculous. "This is exactly like a real cover shoot, you know: the more provocative the better."

  Oh, my ripping bodice! Temple thought. I didn't sign on to be provocative, just to snoop.

  "Luckily," Lacey added, "most of these guys are pretty good, and have their own, like, routines. We'll just get together and decide whether we go horizontal or vertical, like where we wrap our legs and arms and all that stuff. You know, consult before trying it."

  Did she say, "consult before dying!"

  "So you've done this before?" Temple said aloud.

  "Naw, I talked to a girl who did it last year. She's running the bookstore this time."

  "Why isn't she modeling again?"

  "Oh, she did this reeeally hot, super-steamy number with the guy who won last year, you know, an'

  her folks saw it on tabloid TV, an' Skintight magazine called an' wanted her to do a, you know, really sexy photo layout and her, like, Stone-Age folks got totally bent out of shape and almost didn't let her come at all this year." Lacey's snapped gum, transmitting a tooth-decaying aroma of fruit-flavor, put a period to her endless sentence.

  On Temple's other side, Quincey bent to pull a red satin garter up her thigh and snapped it into place.

  Temple thought that she would do something different and simply snap. Like a twig. An overaged twig in a tempest not of her own making. But their attention was again drawn to the unknown horrors to come onstage.

  "Now," Fabrizio announced during a lull. "I volunteer for sample pose-down, in case any of you guys are feeling shy."

  None of the guys onstage looked the least bit shy, Temple noticed, with the possible exception of Jake Gotshall. And even he was looking, frankly, pretty hot to trot.

  Nor were any of the assembled hunks swooning with enthusiasm at Breezy's self-sacrificing suggestion. Danny's head had
turned to fix the Dallyin' Italian with the basilisk eye of a director sensing a mutineer.

  No one directs a macho man, though, but his own ego. "Who will be Breezy's little woo-mahn for a run-through, eh?" he asked.

  "Oh, this is too awesome!" Quincey murmured. "Just like one of those historical romance scenes where the women are captured and rounded up to be sold as love slaves and the handsome pirate captain picks one out. Me, me, me!"

  "Wrong period, kid," Lacey said. "You need John Wayne or somebody else dead. Leave the live ones to me."

  She undulated in front of Temple and Quincey to strike a pose in a harem costume apparently made from Salome's original seven veils after the moths had gotten through with it. A hand that jingle-jangled with seventeen or so thin brass bangles waved to and fro. "I'll do it, Fabrizio!"

  But that would have been too easy. Too easy for Breezy, Temple muttered in her mind.

  She knew what was coming. He knew from experience that she was easy to pick up. She was a marked woo-mahn. Quincey was right. Temple was beginning to feel like the much-put-upon heroine of a historical romance.

  Time froze. Temple's mind beat birdlike against the confining cage bars of reality, seeking refuge in memories of a moment so like this one: a scene from one, or ten, of the historical romances she had speed-read in the past few days. She stood there, on that sandy, forgotten shore, in her disheveled finery.

  "Who will be Breezy's little woo-mahn? I will run through anyone who says me nay, eh?" he demanded. Rasped. G.R.O.W.L.ed.

  Captain Breezy Beelzebub "Blast" Slaughters intense eyes, bluer than all the seven seas churned together into one seething, intemperate tidal wave, raked over the captured prey, frightened booty of the good ship Windswept.

  Then they paused on the frozen form of dismayed Tempest Storm, proud, Titan-haired daughter of planter Gust Storm and his lovely but frail aristocratic wife Gale, and sister of the darling baby boy Squall

  . . . who would do exactly that, were he to understand his sisters vile predicament.