A bottle of tall, clear liquor guarded the tabletop receiver. The faint drone of a dial tone wafted all the way to the door.
Cooke was slumped over, elbows on his knees, a bathroom water glass tilting in one hand.
The other hand was clenched in his perfect two-hundred-dollar razor-cut.
"Darren, what's the matter?" The personal assistant sounded like a hysterical teenager.
Cooke turned toward the door. He seemed to have heard the girl, but he focused on Temple. The Hollywood tan, whether from the sun or a bottle, looked like a waxy yellow buildup on his too-taut face.
"Good," he said, straightening. "Keep the guests happy, Alison. And you"--he was lost for a name, then found one--"Nancy! You stay."
Temple exchanged a puzzled glance with Alison, who tucked her glossy features into a disapproving pucker suitable for a nineteenth-century old maid, and left.
Temple took the seat Cooke indicated with a sweep of his manicured hand. It was a biscuit-colored suede chaise longue worth about three grand.
He pointed again, now to the travertine bedside tabletop. "Ouzo. My favorite private stock.
Straight from Athens. Want some?"
Temple nodded. She didn't, but finding a glass would help the man pull himself together.
He lurched up and disappeared beyond a set of double doors that likely le d to a palatial bathroom. While he was gone, she studied the master bedroom, which was as close as she'd ever come to High-Roller Heaven. Not for real VIPs the garish, gaudy excesses of lower-level suites, the ones that make the magazines and newspapers, the ones everybody likes to snicker at, for their sunken Roman baths, built-in waterfalls and tacky theme-park decor. Everything here was expensively plain and simple, boring even.
She looked down at her feet and wiggled her toes. The absurd flamingo-pink feather pom-poms on her toes fluttered and flirted back. That was her reality check; that's what kept her feet on the ground, the sweet eternal extravagance of shoes. Sole on ice. Not ouzo.
He came out finally, empty glass in hand, an ordinary heavy hotel glass, thick and clumsy.
"I'm not drunk, just. . . stunned."
"Maybe you need more help than I can give." Temple started to rise.
"No. No Papa Bear of police. No Mama Bear of shrink. You're like Baby Bear's bed and chair and porridge, just right. You won't scare the house." He sat on the bed's edge, then poured a couple inches of what looked like water into the glass. "Besides, Savannah hates your guts, and Savannah hates only people with class."
"If you know that, why do you know Savannah?"
He pointed wearily at the bottle. "My favorite private stock. Women without class."
"Aren't you married?"
"Oh." As if he had forgotten. "Oh, yeah. To a classy lady. Did that right, when I finally did it."
He glanced up through ruffled eyebrows, the thicker lintels age offers fading eyesight. A remnant of boyish charm trickled through. "You don't care. What can I do? Pay you? Give you comps? Why are you even here?"
"I'm curious."
"Like your cat. Midnight Louie. Light-Foot Louie." He laughed until the room rang. "What a performer, that cat. Knows how to hog the spotlight, and that's what fame is all about. Ask O. J.
Look. I'm not drunk. I know what you're thinking. I know what I'm thinking." He pointed to the abandoned phone receiver, still droning. The warning yodel that it was off-the-hook had long since given up the ghost. For some reason, Darren Cooke wouldn't--couldn't--break the connection with that dead phone line.
"Phone's a best friend to a guy in my game. Traveling. Alone. Phone home, if you got one, or got anyone there. Phone room service. Phone Athens for ouzo." He snapped his fingers. "It's the geezers' Internet."
"Sometimes people phone you."
"Yeah. Not often. Fans. Don't want fans on the phone. Letters are okay. Letters are distant.
Impersonal." He frowned. "Usually. The phone is personal."
Temple sipped the ouzo for lack of anything else to do. Never had it. A sharp licorice tang and the sting of almost-pure alcohol. She had heard ouzo could knock out a sailor, and she had never been to sea.
"What's wrong?" she asked.
"I don't know." He opened the bedside-table drawer and pulled out a manila envelope.
An ordinary manila envelope. Temple took it when he offered it, amazed at where common ground existed. He was a star, but he stuffed the secrets of his shredded life into an ordinary manila envelope just like everybody else.
She pulled the papers out slowly, feeling them first. Stationery, that slightly soft weight.
Serviceable, store-bought goods, nothing expensive, unlike everything else in this room.
"I've been getting those letters for the past couple years. From my daughter."
"I didn't know--"
"Neither did I."
His left hand--ringless--ploughed through his dark hair. The ruffling gesture never revealed a glint of silver. Washed away, rinsed away. He drank from his glass and spoke again.
"Neither did I. No one ever said I had a daughter, or a son, or a goddamn golden retriever.
Not one woman, asking for money, asking for marriage, asking for anything. The women have never asked for anything. I guess I was enough."
"Or you weren't worth asking for."
He looked up. "I'm a rotter, aren't I? Never married, never wanted to ... until lately. The man women love to love, and love to hate and maybe both." He pointed to the phone. "She hates me. She's never met me except through tabloid TV but she hates me. I've been sitting here listening to the drone of her disconnected hate for half an hour. Look at those letters."
Temple didn't want to. This wasn't work for Nancy Drew. This was the dregs of someone else's life, not clean like a dead body you don't know. This was a live body on the dissecting table. She didn't need to crawl over it like a maggot.
"Listen. I don't have any friends," he said. When she looked up, his smile was crooked, but working on being charming again. "Just girlfriends. I can't tell my wife. We have a daughter. It would scare her to death that some ... stranger from my past is out there, hating me, hating us.
Maybe hating our kid. I love that little girl." His voice almost broke. "Me now . . . maybe Padgett later."
"This is way over my head."
"I know. But for right now, I need to talk to somebody who's totally outside of it. Nobody I know, nobody I don't know. Don't you see? You're just right, like Baby Bear. I need somebody who's over their head, like me. Until I can sort it out, and then, I'll do the right thing and I'll tell the police and hire the bodyguards, but right now I need Nancy Drew, you know. Somebody normal, who's as surprised as I am, but just a little bit objective."
Temple had started to skim the letters. They weren't what she had thought. The envelopes were sealed with fanciful stickers. The letters themselves were illustrated with rubber stamps and multicolored inks. Artworks of a sort, expressing admiration and connection and a desire to be friends. Like letters a foster child in a foreign land would write a sponsor at first, crude, reaching-out letters, eager and innocent.... The handwriting changed, Temple saw as she shuffled through them, carefully organized by date and rubber bands. Organized by his hand, this man who had someone to do everything for him but solve his life puzzles.
"What's your name again?" he asked.
"Temple Barr."
"Temple. Good name. Like all my friends are naming their kids. We're old hell-raisers and late-life dads, but we can afford it. We can afford to give our kids weird wacky names, and the position and money to live 'em down. They don't have to be Tom, Dick or Harrys; Joanne, Marjorie or Marys. Padgett. It's got class. It says I'm somebody unique, right?" He frowned as he glanced at the droning phone receiver.
"What name does she sign?" Temple asked, turning to the letters' second and third pages.
Nothing. Your daughter. No name other than that.