Temple considered herself open-minded, but she hated his daily *'Buchanan's Broadside"
column, and its leering tours of the lowest nightlife in Vegas. She hated the Las Vegas Scoop, a finger-smudging tabloid, dirty in more ways than one with its tawdry, full-page photos of
''escort" boys and girls, including private dancers of every sexual persuasion from vichyssoise to Brazil nuts.
Temple parked her freshly washed Storm in front of a sidewalk littered with dead sporting event stubs and the aforesaid escorts' faces wearing the imprint of size twelve shoes. Standing before the Las Vegas Scoop's narrow, almost clandestine doorway, she hated to touch the scratched doorknob.' The place reminded her of a porno movie theater; you always wondered who had been here, fingering what with what.
"I must be insane," she muttered.
But she did write a heck of a production number, and how nice to have Crawford come crawling to her for rescue, not that crawling was such an alien occupation for him!
The grimy front door was locked. Oh, great.
Temple jammed on her red-framed sunglasses again and glanced back at her car. She hated working away from her home office anyway, although she prided herself on versatility. Mostly, she hated collaborating. She who writes best, writes alone. Having Crawford close enough to collaborate with was not a happy thought.
The door opened and there he was, not wearing the usual pale, prissily tailored suit, which gave the Fontana brothers' signature look a bad name.
Crawford Buchanan wearing a pineapple-yellow knit shirt and--ugh!--white Bermuda shorts was a sight to make even sunglass-shaded eyes sore. Apparently equating him with a furry-legged spider had been eerily on target, Temple observed with a quick, distasteful downward glance.
'*You look . . . perky today, T.B.," was Buchanan's smarmy opener.
''Show me to the computers,'' Temple growled, brushing past him without brushing anything else obnoxious, such as a fingerprint-smudged doorjamb. One never knew when the police might require physical evidence.
The place was deserted, as advertised. For a moment Temple wondered if Crawford was going to try anything funny, anything funny being an unwanted pass, either verbal or physical.
He fancied himself a ladies' man, and no number of acid put-downs could disabuse his bottomless ego of the notion.
''We can work in my office," he said, turning to wend through a room crowded with desks, computer terminals, dismembered Las Vegas Scoops, overflowing aluminum ashtrays, and empty styrofoam coffee cups that looked as if they had all suffered the runs. The only thing missing was a disheveled dead body.
Temple inhaled stale cigarette smoke--and the super-sweet reek of more than one cheap cigar--deeply regretting the moment she had answered her kicky red phone to begin this descent into journalistic hell.
"You have an office?" she asked hopefully. Crawford himself was at least clean to the point of fussiness. It had to be better there.
"Sure," his deep, disc-jockey voice said cockily. "I'm a key columnist for the Scoop," The office even had a door on it, apparently another perk for a Scoop employee.
Temple edged inside, making sure her swollen tote bag never brushed the door frame. The furnishings were old, but dusted. Everything was organized, down to the two computers sitting back to back on the desk.
Temple raised a fire-engine-red eyebrow.
Crawford's shrug only demonstrated how much nature had shorted him on shoulders. "I moved another computer in here so we could consult. And I figured you could do without inhaling the cigarette halitosis of the city room."
" Thank you," Temple said, eyeing a neat pile of bond paper. "Are those the scripts for the show?"
Crawford nodded.
''Are they any good?"
"I wrote them all," he answered with irritation.
"That's why I asked."
Temple swung her tote bag onto a vacant folding chair. Let Buchanan try anything and he'd learn what self-defense tactics Matt Devine had taught her in the past few weeks. Plus, she was in group therapy. She was no pushover, despite looking no larger than a Munchkin.
''I don't know why I have to work here," she complained, pushing the power-on button and watching the computer screen perform its usual opening routine, while she fretted about the forthcoming task.
Come up with an instant closing number for the Gridiron ... what topics were worth shish-kebabbing this year in particular? Las Vegas's usual hyperactive civic bloat offered a surfeit of suitably large targets.
"Just work away and don't mind me," Crawford suggested with a simper from his perch on the desk edge. "Nice shoes, T.B."
Temple glanced up. He was eyeing her legs, not her shoes. Make that drooling. Surely her conservative beige Van Elis, the businesswoman's basic dress heel, wouldn't merit much notice.
Crawford begged to differ.
"I do like those hooker shoes."
"These are not hooker shoes!-Hooker shoes have heels four inches tall and are trashy. And cheap. These designer pumps will pump three inches of iron spike into your shin if you don't sit down and stick to business, whatever it is the sole author of the Gridiron does when he's short of scripts and begs for help."
He followed her suggestion with irritating slowness. "Don't mind me. I'm here to answer any questions, that's all. Pretend I'm a piece of furniture."
Temple stared at the cursor and typed ''wp'' for WordPerfect. The familiar program flashed up in amber characters. Imagining what piece of furniture Crawford Buchanan could be was distracting, but she settled on a Victorian model of water closet named after its inventor, a certain infamous Mr. Crapper, and smiled.
For a while she was only aware of the sharp clack of her long fingernails on plastic and the speedy chuckle of the computer keyboard under her fingertips. And the occasional turn of a tabloid page beyond the computer screen.
By the time Temple had a screenful of idea fragments to consider, half an hour had passed surprisingly painlessly. Why was Crawford being so good? She eyed him over the computer screen. Of course he wasn't doing anything, except skimming the rag he worked for and watching her work; it was probably all he did all day anyway.
"How about,'' she asked at last, **a production number on all the big new hotels and theme parks."
"We did skits on those projects as they came up in past years."
"Yeah, but this would be the Mother of all Modem Redevelopment skits: a Theme Park from Hell bigger than anything that has hit the Strip yet."
''It's hard to top reality in Las Vegas, T.B."
''That's why you brought me in on this, C.B."
"Try whatever you think. I'm final arbiter, though."
"Oh, great. You beg me to contribute something, then you're going to play judge and jury, plus impresario?"
"That's the show chairman's job. Life is full of uncertainty. I'm sure you'll rise to the occasion."
He leaned around her computer to leer in the direction of her legs again.
"You are disgusting, or hasn't anyone told you?"
Crawford smiled. "They tell me all the time, but flattery doesn't cut any ice with me."
"Nor does good taste," Temple said with a snarl, returning to the job that brought her here: creating a clever, fresh, workable script out of thin air while being ogled by the city's worst black sheep in Tom Wolfe clothing.
Chapter 10
Present Tense
Three o'clock in the morning wasn't really a bad time--if it was the end of your working day, so to speak. The Las Vegas air was cool, maybe sixty-five degrees. Street lights and stars sprinkled the black desert sky.