Cameras were rolling, and so was she.
In fact, she wore Rollerblades. And skin-tight capris, a sweatband reading Go Gurrrrl, and a hot pink sports bra liberally assisted by various boob-building devices.
Xoe! Zowie!
The cameras followed her as she did a wheelie at the mansion’s front door.
What an entrance. The doorway, not hers. Double doors, of course, of embossed copper with pewter hardware. The effect was more like the entrance to a bank vault than a residence.
She noted the security camera leering down from above and blew a huge bubble of well-chewed pink bubble gum right at it before she entered. On Rollerbladed feet.
Beth Marble, the show’s guardian angel, was waiting for her in the marble-tiled foyer.
“No edged instruments allowed inside the house. That includes Rollerblades.”
“That also include fingernails?” Temple fanned her impressive ten.
“Fingernails are feminine. Allowed.”
“That’s what you think.” Temple bent to detach the Rollerblades.
“You’re an interesting case.”
“I thought a case had an alcohol content.”
“You’re not as tough as you act.”
Duh!
Temple sneered. Being a bad, ballsy little broad, as Rafi Nadir had named her once, not mentioning the bad, was fun.
“Here, honey.” She handed over the heavy, bulky blade set. “Hang this on your hope chest.” She stared pointedly at the angel’s decidedly flat version of same. “You need one.”
No hope there.
“Listen, kiddo,” the woman said, dropping her voice into a soft, warning tone. “I came up with the Teen Queen concept. Consider me the show shrink. Part of your makeover involves an improvement in attitude. If you want to have a chance at the Teen Queen slot, you’ll use your time here, with me, to get that beehive-size chip off your shoulder.”
“We gotta see each other?”
“Every day for an hour. Be prepared to open up your baggage or drop to the bottom of the first wave of wannabes on Day Three.”
Xoe made a face but kept further comment to herself. Beth thrust a shiny hot-pink folder toward her. “Here are the house rules and your daily schedule of self-improvement appointments. Remember, we work on body, mind, heart, and soul, so be prepared to bare all four.”
“You sure this is legal? A lot of these girls are underage.”
Beth’s patient smile hinted at perennial martyrdom. “We’re well aware of that. We’re assigning rooms on a Big Sister/Little Sister basis, so roommates won’t be competing at the same level. The name of your Little Sister is in the folder.”
“A mini-me! How hip. Who is the little devilette?”
Temple let her long fingernails do the walking through the half-inch wad of loose papers inside the folder.
Mariah Molina. Her roomie. The gods, or at least the Great Goddess Cop, had smiled on her so she could ride shotgun with poor little Mariah.
Why any right-thinking kid would want to coop herself up in a phony media circus like this was beyond Temple, but then Temple was too far beyond the Teen Dream stage to remember.
Beth Marble glanced around all sides of Temple and then nodded her satisfaction.
“Glad you’re not dragging any more than your one bag and your bad attitude in here. The ‘Tween Queen branded sweat suits and other workout wear you’ll be using during your makeover are in your room, in the proper size. Your personal stylist will confer with your personal trainer on your new wardrobe, when it’s time for your ‘reinvention.”’
“Meanwhile,” Temple observed, “it’s in the army now.”
“That’s right.” Beth’s Stepford Wives smile never faltered. “You are a private and we are the commanders. We’re here to help you but only if you’re willing to commit to helping yourself. You may go to your room until our Cheering Session at five P.M. tonight.”
“It sounds more like PMS,” Temple muttered as she shuffled off in her stocking feet.
“What?” Beth asked, a trifle uneasy.
“Nothing you’re not too old for.”
Two faint frown lines on Beth’s forehead indicated she might have sensed an insult.
Awesome! The woman seemed made of the same impervious veneer as the remade toothy smiles on the women from the makeover shows.
The house was huge. It was a perfect pick for a castle because of the copper-topped towers that surrounded the huge copper dome at the place’s center. These mysterious copper roofs glittered enough to be seen from the Strip. They’d been treated to keep their bright copper-bottompan gleam and not age into a verdigris color with wear and weather.
That new-penny look always bothered Temple when she glimpsed the place. It was rather like Burt Reynolds during his cosmetic face-peel stage: so shiny and smooth that it gave you the creeps.
It especially gave Temple the creeps. Las Vegas was the kind of high-profile place where new scandals and sensations constantly made yesterday’s atrocity fade into prehistory. Yet she’d learned the horrific history of this house when she’d first come to town two years ago. And a good PR person never forgets.
Over the past twenty or so years, the house had been a white elephant, huge and impossible to reinvent. It had been a Halloween spook-show place for a while. A theme restaurant. (Middle-Eastern, with the Disneyesque Neuschwanstein castle towers appropriately repainted as minarets.) A funeral home. That was the weirdest and last incarnation. And lately, it had stood perilously empty, inviting vandals, until it had been turned into the set for a presumably hot reality TV show.
The first time it had made media news, it had just been another sprawling tribute to big money and minuscule taste.
Temple was one up on the other contestants.
As a media person, she’d heard of the bizarre tragedy that had made this place the house that no one wanted to own. The builder had been Arthur Dickson, a reclusive techno-geek who’d wired it for every media known to man at the time and filled it with high-tech toys and Elvis trivia. He’d gotten married here to a former showgirl and mother of a young daughter, who reportedly topped him by six inches… . Of course, the marriage disintegrated in a haze of vindictive heat over sex and money. During the trial separation, the wife and stepdaughter got the house.
It ended with a big shootout one night. When it was over, the stepdaughter was seriously maimed, caught in the crossfire; the showgirl-wife had been shot in the shoulder, her male friend had been killed, and the husband had vanished.
Since then, no one had seen Arthur Dickson, the man who’d bought and rebuilt this mansion in tribute to Elvis. He was presumed dead. A second cousin had later brought suit charging that his body had been spirited away, because after seven years his estate had reverted to the wife and he had been declared dead.
So Temple approached this house with the notion that it had best served its history when it had been a funeral parlor, not the set for a frivolous TV program.
The doorbell pealed out “You Ain’t Nothin’ But a Hound Dog.”
It reminded Temple that Dickson had been an Elvis nut. The place boasted a grotto outside the pool fit for a mass burial. But Graceland it was not. This house had apurely Las Vegas mystique, from the copper-domed four-story towers along the sprawling façade to the rumored wine cellar vault in the bowels of an unusual Las Vegas real estate feature, a basement.
Temple edged into the entry hall, not knowing what to expect but ready for anything.
At least Xoe Chloe was.
Chapter 17
Mr. Chaperon
Imagine the Taj Mahal with a copper roof and a six-car garage and you have a pretty good idea of what the Arthur Dickson house looks like.
As my Miss Temple in her new outré garb vanishes inside, its white stucco walls shimmer in the midday Las Vegas sunlight like a whited sepulcher. Wait! I have a more topical simile. It shimmers like those Da Vinci dental veneers you see on the queen of TV makeover shows, The Swan. I bet old Leonardo himself is rolling over in his sarcophagus in Italy to hear how his name is being bandied about in everybody’s upscale mouth these days. Fame is one thing; foolishness is another.