Outside, the sun had blown town and the dark felt like a cool chiffon curtain. The Strip was far enough away that they could look up and see the big desert stars without any neon competition. Temple couldn't even hear the roar of the Mirage volcano.
Autumn was coming, and nights toyed with growing chill. She rubbed her hands up and down her bare forearms, feeling goose bumps. The night felt fresh. Senses sharpened now that the heat was withdrawing from the pavement beneath their feet like fever from a healing patient. Out in the desert, night life of another sort than the Strip's frenetic pace would be stirring, scuttling. Here, on the fringes, the city of Las Vegas was quiet for a change, keeping decent hours. Only nine p.m.
They walked around the free-standing building, smiling at its neon frills, to the side parking area. It wasn't easy to find Temple's low-profile Storm among a lot crammed with alien cars that had arrived since they came.
"Popular place," she commented.
Matt looked thoughtful." Maybe--"
"I know. Maybe Molina's the drawing card. But you heard her: nobody knows when she's going to show up."
"That's a terrific trait in a police officer. Maybe in a singer, too."
Temple shook her head and pulled the loose-woven shawl she carried over her shoulders.
"When you know what she does for a living, it colors the show. I thought I'd die when she launched into 'Someone to Watch Over Me.' "
Matt laughed. ''Me, too. I mean, here I am asking you how to get information out of unwilling witnesses. And, not twenty feet away, there's the city's top homicide cop in eavesdropping distance--only she's singing her lungs out."
"Well, she's 'a' homicide cop. I don't know if she's 'the top' homicide cop."
"The top homicide cop we know. And then when she sang 'The Man that Got Away'--"
Temple started laughing and couldn't stop. She laughed so hard that she nearly dropped her doggie carton. "Holy Guacamole! Louie would kill me if this stuff went 'splat.' 'The Man that Got Away,' please! Oh, God, do you suppose she . . . she . . . dedicated it to Max?"
Matt was laughing harder than she was now, leaning against the car's aqua side, his elbows on its now-cool roof. "Max?"
Temple lurched against the car's fender, crushing her straw handbag between herself and hard metal, barely able to talk. She nodded, controlled her laughter for a few instants before it came bubbling out again with her words. "Max. Molina--"A whole glissando of guffaws."--
wants to, to interrogate him--" Temple almost slid along the fender to the asphalt, she was laughing so intensely'' --in the worst way! Oh, my side ... I think I--"
''Stop it! "Matt commanded between his own sputters of hilarity. ''We could . . . could hurt ourselves laughing like this after a big dinner.''
"What big dinner?" Temple squeezed out, doubled over. Tears showered her face. "We were so shook up we could hardly eat a ... a bite.''
"Yeah, Molina really put the collar on our . . . appetites."
They both went off again, laughing uncontrollably. "Maybe," Temple sputtered. "Maybe she could sing at Weight Watchers meetings!"
Everything they said, everything they thought, seemed hysterically funny. They laughed until it hurt, and until they couldn't stop even though it hurt. They still laughed when they had run out of words. Just an assessing glance, to see if the other had sobered up, so to speak, sent the assessor off to Ha-Ha Land again.
Temple finally shook her head, wiping away tears with her bare hands. Matt pulled himself upright, away from the car, like a man trying to shake off a drunk. He offered her a plain white linen handkerchief. Who carried handkerchiefs nowadays, she wondered--except maybe funeral directors? And priests.
"Nothing we said was really that funny," Matt pointed out.
Temple nodded agreement, wiping her face with die harsh linen, clutching her shawl, her purse, her carton. The occasional trill of laughter still broke free without warning, like a hiccup.
"I guess you had to have been there." she said, "and unfortunately--we were!"
They laughed again, an exhausted emotional eddy of self-circling sounds that faded into breathy coughing, some disciplinary lip-biting and finally rueful smiles.
Matt shook his head. "It's not my night."
"Nor mine. Listen, Matt." Temple tried real hard to get serious, because what she had to say was serious. "What you were asking me in there is important. I hate to preach at you, but if you take on the task of finding out something other people don't know, of pumping people who may not want to tell you something, or who don't know what you're really after, you've got to have a
... an ethic."
He nodded. Ethics he understood instantly.
"I may seem simply nosy to you, but I used to work as a TV news reporter. Maybe this isn't news to you, but all our institutions--governmental bureaucracy, corporate leaders, the church--" she added pointedly "--they all operate on a 'need-to-know' basis, just like the spy guys at the CIA, or something. They figure that we--the citizen, the consumer, the client, the public--don't need to know the inside scoop, the motive, opportunity and the real reasons.
They want to keep us ignorant for our own good.' "
"A major failing of the church, as the hierarchy is finding out now to its eternal regret."
''Regret?" Temple asked sharply. "Or chagrin that it can't keep washing its own dirty laundry in private?"
Matt shrugged, waiting for her point.
"So. There you are. Or I am. We think we are pretty decent human beings with pretty decent motives, and we think that knowing the truth is better than not. We have what journalists call 'a right to know.' That's in direct opposition to the 'need to know' everybody running things wants us to have. So we have to be clever instead of confrontational. We have to ask the right questions of the right people, pull back all the wrong curtains and peek. And guess what?"
''If we pay attention to the man behind the curtain--"
Temple nodded, "Sometimes we find out he's got his hand in the till, or in the wrong underwear or in messing up the future of the country."
"Sometimes we find out it's a her," Matt put in.
Temple nodded again. "And sometimes, we find out. . . he's only pissing."
That set him laughing again,
"That may be vulgar, but I couldn't resist," she said.
Matt sobered faster than she did. "Truth usually is vulgar," he said. 'That's your message.
You can't clean a window to see through it without smearing some of the dirt around first. Isn't it hard now, to be on the other side?"
"You mean doing pubhc relations?" Temple leaned against the fender again, setting her purse and carton on the hood, pulling her shawl closer. 'That's the beauty of freelance. I work for myself, not Them." She sighed. 'That's how I got involved in the murders; I couldn't just let the victims be swept under the rug, especially those poor strippers' lives, which were so rotten already anyway. I guess my only rough time in PR was at the Guthrie, when I collected a salary to protect an Institution."
"Sounds like a vocation."
She grimaced. "Even an organization as benign as an arts group can harbor its secrets: an actor who's temperamental, or drunk and disorderly on the set, or a druggie; money shenanigans. Not that Guthrie confronted me with anything like that, but the world-renowned children's ballet had a ghastly PR problem years back, if you can call it such a trivial thing. The founder and director was a pederast." She glanced at Matt. "When it all came out, they discovered he'd had one youthful molestation arrest, and he'd been in the seminary briefly--"
"Shit!" Matt said, shocking her. "Sorry. I don't usually .. . it's like having been in a war, and then finding out half your comrades have been fighting for the enemy."
"Some poor woman was PR director for the children's ballet when that broke." Temple shuddered, though the night was not that cool. "I'm glad I've never had to smother that kind of fire. I'm glad I don't work for anyone anymore that I can't walk away from at any time. I'm even glad that Max Kinsella pried me loose from my 'position,' then left me high and dry and a freelancer in Las Vegas." Her smile grew crooked. "Sometimes I think the ethics curve is higher here, believe it or not. They've had enough decades of honest greed, lust and fun to be forthright about it."