"I called," he said. "Called them up, called them all up, everybody I could think of, or whose phone number I could find. No, they said, no abortions, no hidden clauses, no kids. I was careful.
I knew to be careful. Wouldn't you think the woman would know?"
Temple nodded. "Weren't there other women, not-famous women who maybe didn't know how to be so careful?"
"I didn't exploit anyone. They knew what it was. They were of age. They were smart, attractive women. So what's the sin in that? I didn't want to be tied down. The house, the car, the dog, the wife, the kid. Everything a 'the.' Me 'the' husband. I wasn't cut out for that. So they called me a playboy. The guys always leered and the women, they kept coming. It was so easy."
Temple sighed. "Maybe she isn't your daughter. Maybe she just thinks so."
"Does that make her any less . . . worrisome. Or dangerous?"
"No. Maybe more so. Look, Mr. Cooke. Call the police, call a crack private-investigative agency. Don't sit here in a hotel room with a bottle of ouzo and a stranger."
His head lifted. "I feel better."
"Is that all it's about? You feeling better?"
"No. But that's something. I tell you, I was ready to jump out of one of these tinted-glass windows when that call came through."
Temple felt an awful clutch in her stomach, a sense that she was standing on a road alone, watching a train wreck about to happen.
"Look," she said. "I've gone through these letters, but I've used a tissue to touch them. There could be fingerprints. Go to the police, or to an investigative agency with police like powers, and I imagine a few are well-known in Hollywood. You do have friends! You have all those aging guys you used to party with. They'd understand. They could be in the same fix. They'll help you.
They're powerful people--"
"No! We're not powerful. We just got seduced into thinking we were because we were rich and famous. In a way, I want to meet her. I want to see what kind of girl she is, maybe explain."
"That's the worst thing you could do." Temple replaced the letters, handed back the envelope, stood. "I can't help you. I can only tell you what you already know."
He nodded, looked down, finally picked up the receiver, ponderously, in slow motion, and hung it up.
"You could stay," he said, slyly, like a dying man who enjoys bargaining with the Devil, even if it's the devil within.
Temple felt the room rock. If she'd had the manila envelope still in her hands, she would have crushed it.
"Is that, really, always your only bottom line? Haven't you learned anything? Hasn't this taught you anything? I could be your daughter's age. I could be your daughter."
He shrugged. "I'm lonely. I'm lonelier than I've ever been. Is it so bad to want to be not lonely?"
Temple tried to think back to when she had been the teensiest bit flattered to be i nvited to Darren Cooke's hotel house party. She had, and it was not that long ago.
"Maybe not," she said finally, "but there are better ways to work on being not lonely.
Propositioning strangers isn't one of them."
"So you need rings and regulations to sleep with someone."
"No, but I need ... self-respect, on both sides."
She turned before she picked up her ouzo glass and did something B movieish like tossing it in his face. That face was too tormented, even as it resorted to what had always worked for it before.
"Nobody's ever turned me down before," he called after her, as an afterthought, a warning, a plea.
She turned from the closed door. "They will." Then she opened it and walked out.
Chapter 14
Partners in Crime
"I am never," Temple told Louie when she returned to her condo and peeled out of her Hollywood-brunch garb like a snake shedding a particularly loathsome skin, "going to involve myself in possibly criminal matters again. And you can quote me."
Louie blinked to indicate that the message had been received. He then watched wide-eyed while Temple disappeared into the bathroom for an unprecedented midday dip. She left behind a trail of knee-high hose, a tangle of shed leggings and a tent of white shirt.
Also two tipsy shoes leaning against the wall, black with extremely pink and fluffy feather arrangements on each toe. Feathers, oh my. Louie jumped down to the floor.
The bathroom door opened.
"And leave my shoes alone, you unreformed feather freak!"
Temple snatched the heels into the bathroom with her, shutting the door with an emphasis that was second cousin to a slam.
Louie sniffed the place where the prey had been, hunting that indefinable avian essence, then lumbered out into the main room, where he presumably could pursue predatory thoughts without being subjected to ESP.
Beyond the closed bathroom door, up to her neck in hot water, as usual, and up to her nose in mounds of bubbles, Temple regretted taking out her bad temper on Louie. Poor little guy had worked hard the past two days, then when he craved a little feather-sniffing, she had treated him like a pervert.
Temple often turned to baths as her own private think tank, especially in this old fifties tub that was deep and wide enough to float in. Thoughts somehow grew as airy and improvisational as the sudsy coverlet of clouds that shifted on the water's warm surface.
"Might as well have tried to help Crawford Buchanan with his sulky stepdaughter," Temple addressed the admirably echoing tile walls. "At least I would have known enough to just say 'no'
in his case, under any circumstances. But Darren Cooke was a star, he really needed some nobody's encouraging words and savvy insight into human behavior. Savvy, huh! Insight, huh!
Suckered again."
Temple grabbed the barge of Ivory soap that obligingly floated as advertised, and smashed it on the water. Tile walls wept tepid tears. "What a skunk. That guy will use any excuse to hit on a female. I can't believe that I thought he possibly could care about anything besides the notches on his Calvin Kleins! I hope the Daughter from Hell chases him from here to Pago Pago."
Of course no one could hear her fine denunciations; nothing could view them except the mirror above the sink, and it was fogged over. An apt symbol, Temple thought, for her recent perceptions. Well, nothing had been lost except a tiny remaining strand of illusion and a couple hours of a Sunday morning. Getting back to work with Domingo tomorrow would be a refreshing contrast. At least he flaunted his mistress, so he was hardly about to try anything tacky with Temple. Right?
Imagine, using the letters from that poor demented child to gain female sympathy as a preseduction ploy!
Temple rose from her steamy cleansing ritual, wrapped herself in a huge white bath towel and pattered across the black-and-white tiles to the bedroom, which was empty and cool. She stashed her retrieved shoes in the closet, safe from tooth and claw... and, even worse, saliva.
Then, still wrapped like a mummy in the ankle-length towel, she decided to raid the refrigerator, given how few of the buffet's expensive tidbits she had been able to eat.
Louie watched her from the sofa, the unread Sunday paper beside him and now beneath a proprietary paw.
"That's mine when I come back," she warned him.
Cats made excellent company. They received comments with grave attention but no overreaction. They were rarely anxious or milling underfoot, like dogs. Instead, they surveyed matters with supreme calm from a lordly or ladylike distance, which is why some people disliked them.
Temple was not in the mood for catlike detachment at the moment. After she made a mug of instant hot chocolate, she skittered out the kitchen's other end to the spare bedroom/office, where her answering machine was set up.
Sure enough, the little red Rudolph-nose button was winking, blinking and nodding. Her finger hesitated over the playback lever. Did she want to hear from somebody unwelcome today? Did she really want to know about something she would have to do tomorrow? Did she care to tend to any kind of business at all?