Then he grabbed her, twisted her, dipped her until her shoulder-length hair touched the stage floor.
All the while she looked like a virgin sacrifice to the volcano gods. Temple glanced away. She had overheard some of the author escorts begging not to be dipped, but this guy was gonna dip her or die. It was a kind of social rape, like going to the prom with someone who got ugly or drunk.
The mostly female audience hooted and howled and applauded. They did love their dips, as long as someone else was being dipped. The blond woman tottered down the runway steps, looking as if she wished she were dead.
"Some of these guys are pigs!" Emma Ransom spat, none too softly.
Temple nodded. She had seen the Good, the Bad, and now the Ugly. The pageant was like life, and death, full of endless variety and wonder, sometimes surprisingly nice and sometimes gratuitously self-serving.
Another couple waited in the wings. Temple braced herself after that last unpleasant pas de deux.
They made an odd couple: he, young for a hunk, tentative. She, mature and almost aggressively poised. Her hair was a shellacked helmet. Her gown was structured pink polyester from the sixties. Her smile was stiffly broad. Like me, or else!
" '... smile and smile and smile, and still be a villain,' " Emma quoted. "Makes Richard the Third look like a saint!"
Temple tried to ignore the comment.
"What a bitch."
That was harder to ignore.
No more ice was left to chatter in the drink next door, and damn little liquid. Emma Ransom held the plastic glass to her lips like a compress and mumbled into its rim.
"Got me fired from Chapter/Reynolds/Deuce. Needs all the credit. Needs to trample egos the way elephants trample flowers."
Temple tensed. She didn't need this after her really, really bad hair day. And she had been wearing a wig!
"Selfish bitch!"
Temple didn't need this.
"Poor bastard!"
Temple's ears perked up. Was the hunk an object of sympathy?
He did indeed look cowed as he went down on one gallant knee to a poised, triumphant Sharon Rose.
"Sells like pancakes."
Hotcakes, Temple the some times-editor herself corrected. Drink was a terrible weakness. It distorted even the weariest of cliches. And Emma an editor!
"Sells all over the world. Tours the East, the Riviera. Busts balls wherever she goes. She'd look good in the East River, don't you think?" A raucous, unhappy laugh.
Onstage, Sharon Rose drew her long-stemmed rose against the would-be hunk's cheek, from long thorny stem to the satin-soft petals at the blooming end. Oxymoron, the heart of romance: kind and cruel, soft and hard, illusion and reality.
"Busts butts. Busts babes. Bitch."
Hatred was addictive. Temple held herself apart from the tidal wave of venom looming over her. She was here to see the show. That's all.
"All over Europe. Sub-rights. Money rolling in. Millions! No justice. Even the Orient. Rich bitch. Villa in Via Reg, pied-a-terre in Paris, and the bitch can't even spell it! We rewrite her, stupid fool. Husband trotting after her every command. Hypocritical. Queen of sweet romance. Family values. Money, money, money."
"Excuse me." Temple stood up. She needed air.
Sharon Rose still smiled at her kneeling hunk. Temple's long distance vision had seen the single drop of blood on his cheek. The name of the rose is coercion. The name of the game is greed. She saw it--oh, yes--but she didn't need to hear it, not tonight, although she had not listened when a murderer had breathed his murderer's name into her ear like an endearment. Not after the death threat and the diamonds, and the imminent date with Max. And Matt.
Oh, God, she had to get out of here!
Temple stumbled over the woman sitting in the traditional critic's seat on the aisle, the woman sinking on the aisle. Heads turned, then turned back to the stage.
Another hunk and escort came out, came on. She glittered, he shone. Savannah Ashleigh's vacant voice carried to the very last row. Vic showed his dimples for the cameras. Everyone was here, Hard Copy, A Current Affair, and Hot Heads.
Temple was out of there, in the lobby, frantic for a phone. She never thought she'd be this desperate to talk to this person.
The telephone directory was set in eight-point type and even her glasses didn't help. She pushed one eye right to the page and dialed, impatient with the long recorded list of voice-mail options before she got a real person.
"Is there some way, any way, I can reach Lieutenant Molina tonight?"
Clicks and voices and finally a series of rings.
"Molina." Briskly, with a hint of very human annoyance.
"It's . . . Temple Barr."
"Yes?"
Questions for the policewoman. Answers for the PR woman.
"Inquiries are already underway," Molina said. "It'll take a few hours. International time zones,"
Molina said. "Interpol."
Temple winced. Then she spoke again, rushing her words.
"We'll look into it." Molina subscribed to the royal we of bureaucracy everywhere.
"Via Reggio," Temple suggested.
"Boots by design." Molina.
"Traveling." Temple.
"We'll look into it," Molina finished. "Don't worry. Don't worry. We're on it."
"Canada! Have you considered Canada?" Temple again.
"We will now." Molina.
Temple hung up the pay telephone near the Crystal Phoenix front desk. She wouldn't return to the pageant. Her watch, a delicate evening watch with a Barbie doll-size face she had to put her eye almost against, read ten o'clock.
She might as well walk to the Goliath. Fresh air would be welcome.
Chapter 35
Love in Vain
Max melted from among the crowds in the Goliath lobby, the man in black against a black curtain again. Temple couldn't even see his ponytail. "You're early," he said almost hopefully.
"You, too."
"Our chaperon isn't here yet."
"He'll come on time."
"I didn't know he worked nights."
"He'll come on time."
"Meanwhile, would you like a drink?"
"I'm considering teetotalism, but yes."
The Goliath lobby bar featured gilt camel-saddle tables and knee-high silk cushions for chairs.
Temple sank into one gratefully.
"You look frazzled," Max said. "The pageant?"
"Leaving the pageant."
"You don't know who won?"
"I did."
"You've really changed," he said, cocking his head.
"Have you?"
"Maybe not enough."
The waitress came, clad in harem veils. Max sent Temple an inquiring look.
"Bloody Mary," she said with feeling.
Max laughed. "That kind of night?"
"Yes."
"Isn't the case closed?"
"No." She paused, wondering if he'd understand how much she'd hated doing it. "I had to call Molina."
"Lieutenant C. R. Molina." His green eyes laughed at a private amusement, then sobered. "Are you all right?"
So the Four Queens had wondered a day or two ago. Did it show?
"Great. Louie's going to be a star. I'm out from under the hunk pageant, quite literally. I just gave Molina some vital information. It may resolve her case."
"So." Matt lifted his tall glass of exotic liqueur. "What do you want now?"
"Nothing." Temple was surprised to find that was the truth. "What killed Cheyenne--and Fabrizio--and almost killed me, was uglier than ambition, sillier than sex."
"Knowing too much is worse than knowing nothing at all," he warned.
"So you tell me, from self-interest."
"Granted," Max sipped his drink, green as absinthe, yet it couldn't be. Absinthe was illegal now.
"I meant to surprise you," he said. "Instead, you surprise me."
"Good." She was beginning to mellow, in her element.
"I
hope I... don't disappoint you. Tonight."
"Modest Max."
"No, just hedging his bets. Ah. He was early, after all."
He stood, and Matt joined them.
How truly bizarre, Temple thought. Yet not as bizarre as what had happened at the Incredible Hunk pageant.
"Temple has contacted Lieutenant Molina," Max told him.
Matt sat, and refused the waitress an order. His wary eyes stayed on Temple. Her guardian angel against that ole devil previous involvement.
Dark. Light. Wrong. Right. Past. Present. Crime. Punishment. All these concepts were slouching
"Do you want to cruise?" Max asked them.
"Why not?" Temple said.
They walked to the ticket booth, a mole-hole shrouded by trees decked in fairy lights. The Goliath gondolas were gilt and red-velvet, with two facing seats meant for four, or two, not three.
Three got in: Temple on one seat, the men opposite, their long legs filling the space between. The gondola rocked, like a cradle. This was sillier than sex, Temple thought, viewing the busy lobby from an alien angle.
Yet water was soothing, and this water reflected star-flowers from the trees. An automated timer pushed the narrow craft forward, away from the lobby's noise and bustle.
"You're probably wondering why I called all of you together tonight," Max intoned in his master-of-ceremonies voice.
They cruised beneath light-spangled trees, past people sitting down to dinner or dice.
A dark arch awaited them, the mouth of the monster, open and hungry. The gondola slipped inside, and Temple's hands clenched on its gilt sides.
New light reflected the eerie shimmer of neon green constellations on the cloud-shifting ceiling, of scintillating veins of green gold on the walls: laser hologram images cast on air.
"They updated it!" Temple exclaimed.
"I never saw it before." Matt's voice.
"They added illusion," Max said. "Your illusion, Temple."
She viewed the passing walls' panorama of gossamer three-dimensional images. Mere fiberglass and fantasy she knew, yet so very reminiscent of rock and substance. Reality according to Disney: great entertainment.
Lasers cast rainbows on the pseudo-rock. Sometimes they were shadows. Sometimes ghostly faces. She saw veins of exotic ores, lost Aztec treasures, Egyptian artifacts, all glittering in laser-green, all fairy dust and delusion.
Suddenly, Max's long arm shot out as the gondola glided near a wall. A portion of rock flipped open at some subtle touch. Max pressed a red emergency "Stop" button one usually finds in elevators.
"Go get it, swimmer," he said. "We've only got a couple of minutes before someone comes."
Matt started, then his eyes followed Max's other, pointing arm to a luminous display in the opposite wall, just visible in the eerie light.
Beyond the airy dancing of laser-light twinkled a recognizable form. A Cinderella shoe from the twenty-first century.
Matt stared from Temple to Max, then pulled off his shoes, his shirt, his trousers. He dropped into the dark, laser-dappled water, stroking for the niche of light.
"This is crazy," Temple warned Max. "I don't need the actual shoe, I just need to say where it is.
How did you know I was looking for it, anyway?"
"A little bird told me."
Named Electra?
"And I know the hotel," he added modestly.
Did he ever . . . too well.
"Besides"--Max's grin was visible even in the artificial twilight--"Eightball O'Rourke is checking out the Goliath. Better that there be no question who found the shoe."
Matt was paddling back, something dazzling riding above the water in one hand. He pulled himself aboard, the gondola rocking until it almost capsized.
"Whoa!" Matt was laughing as he handed Temple a glittering something. "I guess this must be yours, Madame."
This reality was more incredible than the illusion. The low light emphasized the stones' Austrian-crystal flash as fire-opal sparks of red, green and blue. The shoe spanned the palms of her hands, white-diamond brilliant except for Midnight Louie's jet-black profile, which winked an emerald-green eye.
No one wondered if a cat's eye color was genuine. No one asked a cat where he had been, except possibly to see the Four Queens and sit on top of their dressing table. Midnight Louie would have more than one monarch to visit.
Temple laughed with delight. "If I turn up with this," she explained to Matt, who was stunned by the shoe, "I get a free pair in my size."
He had stopped gawking and was struggling to pull his clothes on over his damp skin. "That water was icier than Lake Michigan."
Temple remembered the lessons of her pose-down stint and emergency sewing job: she thought of England and not of underwear.
"Try it on," Matt suggested. So Temple slipped off her right pump with the steel heel and pushed her foot into all that flash and fire.
"Too big," she said, somehow disappointed. Glass slippers should fit the first time. "A six, probably."
"It looks ... incredible. What size will yours be?"
"A five. It'll take a few weeks for my pair to be made. I can't believe the prize is mine, and two weeks before Halloween. Max, tell me how you knew?"
She looked to the opposite seat, and saw only the dark.
Max was gone.
The water was dark and still.
She turned to Matt. They'd been too busy dressing to notice.
He stopped pulling on his own shoes to shrug. "I think the Mystifying Max says 'Happy Halloween.'"
"What do you think of Max?"
"Don't know yet. I got wet, but he gets to play Prince Charming."
"Why did we come here at his invitation, then?"
"We're congenitally curious."
"Is that so bad?"
"Sometimes. Hey, this barge is moving again."
Temple cradled the shoe against her face, as if she petted Midnight Louie in person. "I won, but it doesn't feel like it yet."
"Winning never lives up to the advance PR."
"Why do you suppose he left?"
"I have no idea." Matt eyed her cautiously in the dimness. "Was it something you said?"
"Or you? You've been spending more time with him lately than I."
He was silent for a moment. "Divide and conquer."
"He'd hardly leave us alone . . . together ... in the dark if that was his strategy."
"Maybe he would. Maybe he wants us to think just what we are thinking."
"Which is?"
"Look, Temple, we've got to settle this thing."
"Thing?"
"What's happening between you and Max?"
"Not much at the moment. We--I--can't just pick up where we left off. Too many rude questions come between us now."
"We can't pick up where we left off either." Matt didn't quite put a question mark on his final inflection, but it threatened.
"I suppose not." Temple trailed her fingers in the cool water that felt like liquid velvet.
"Maybe a moratorium is best for us all," he said.
"Maybe."
A silence.
"Maybe," Matt said suddenly, as the lobby lighting swelled beyond him, "we're doing exactly what the Mystifying Max wants."
Temple grimaced. "That's been known to happen before."
They floated into the fairy lights again, visible to passersby, on an enchanted raft Max had commandeered for a few even-more-enchanted seconds.
"He must be a hell of a magician," Matt admitted, squinting against the glare of Las Vegas's artificially lit night.
"Oh, yes." Temple smiled, serene again, holding the Cinderella slipper on her lap. "We all deserve each other."
Chapter 36
Swept Away
"Aren't you wearing your adorable Renaissance costume to the Awards Banquet and Ball this evening, dear?" Electra asked.
"I've had enough of long gowns and long hair--on either sex-- to last me until 2001."
"Oh, testy." Electr
a glanced at Temple in the wide mirror above the makeup shelf. "Your late night out must have been a lulu. But don't stint on the glitz, girl! If you win an award and have to collect it at the podium, you'll regret not dressing up."
"Win an award? For what? Most Nearly Crushed to Death? Best Incredible Hunk Trampoline?"
Temple stopped fluffing her curls to gaze at Electra.
Electra shrugged. "Maybe best unpublished writer. I noticed some new files appearing in the laptop.
You're writing a romance, admit it!"
"Don't be ridiculous."
"That's kind of hard not to do in this airy-fairy getup." Electra continued, patting iridescent glitter gel on her face and hair.
The costume was more of a cloud, an amorphous gathering of shimmering fabric.
"Now if you win the writing contest," Temple went on indulgently, "you'll be dressed for the occasion. But, trust me; there's nothing in that computer but notes to myself about the Crystal Phoenix renovation. I tend to get ideas at odd hours."
"Hmmm." Electra didn't sound convinced, but that was her problem. "You're not even saying who killed Cheyenne and Fabrizio, and why."
"There's nothing to say. The jury is still out."
"I'm not used to waiting until the jury decides these matters, dear. I'm used to you spelling it all out for me, the moment the perpetrator has been apprehended."
"Maybe the perpetrator hasn't been apprehended yet."
"You do know something!"
Temple slammed her brush down on the travertine. "I don't even know who's going to win the writing contest. Why don't you concentrate on the big unanswered question in your life, and leave the murderer to Molina?"
"You don't."
"And what big, unanswered question do I have in my life?"
"Both of them start with M, as in Men."
Temple was silent, and then she grinned. "Molina and I are cooperating lately. And Midnight Louie has just vaulted into a big TV contract."
"Playing innocent does not become you," Electra said tartly. "Good thing you reneged on the pose-down model role."
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